Elliott Smith would have celebrated his 57th birthday this summer, had he not died of a stab wound to the heart in the autumn of 2003. Many readers won’t place his name, but Smith was a songwriter of such craft that he surely would’ve rated a mention in the recent New York Times survey of greatest living American songwriters had he lived. The two albums at the core of his canon, “Either/Or” (1997) and “XO” (1998), rank among the finest recordings of their era.

Smith once said he aspired to be all four Beatles. His best songs could give any Beatle a run for his money. Some of them — “Say Yes”; “Between the Bars” — work like McCartney songs, with melodies so compelling that they could stand alone. Others — “Pictures of Me”; “Speed Trials” — work like Lennon songs, with repetitive melodies whose genius reveals itself when they interact with bass notes or chords on Smith’s guitar or piano.

But competing with Beatles is a losing battle (just ask Brian Wilson). After those two masterful albums, Smith probably realized that he was never going to reap a fraction of their fortune or fame. His songcraft gradually diminished as he descended into a pit of addiction and depression.

A new biography, Nobody Broke Your Heart, recounts Smith’s life, loves, career, decline, and demise. It’s the first book by Jamie Fisher, a freelance writer, Mandarin Chinese translator, and researcher. A quick Google search turns up a bunch of book reviews under her name and not much else.

The dossier suggests Fisher is not an experienced reporter, with a history of conducting interviews, managing sources, and writing impartial, third-person stories. That thought roiled my brain as I worked my way through Nobody Broke Your Heart. Fisher structures her biography more like a memoir: not a third-person account of the subject’s life, but a first-person account of Fisher’s journey in retelling it.

The narrative flows nicely from scene to scene, but many scenes are set more or less in the present, and Fisher herself is a character. We accompany her as she arrives in a new city, sits down with one of Smith’s old lovers or bandmates or buddies, orders drinks, and shares confidences and tears.  

Here’s a passage recounting one of her meetings with Garrick Duckler, a bandmate:

“Garrick is a psychoanalyst now. Being in a psychoanalyst’s office and asking him the questions is a really odd experience, I write later. I lie down on his analyst’s couch for a moment, because I have to. I spill seltzer on his nice rug. He shows me flyers they had made in high school, the letters Elliott wrote him in college. We cry.”

Is crying allowed in biography?

Fisher is clearly a passionate Elliott Smith fan: Hey, if you’re going to write a book on the guy, you sort of have to be. She probably pressed that point in winning the confidence of Smith’s family, paramours, and friends. She says her book is the first to include most of their voices. She takes pains to present them all in a sympathetic light. She clearly agonizes over passages that have one faction condemning another or that cast doubt on the motives of a romantic partner or producer. She questions — again and again — whether she, or anyone, has the right to know about Smith’s darkest days, about the crack cocaine, the emotionally abusive suicide talk, the gigs where he couldn’t remember his own songs.

“For a long time, I thought this was my puzzle to solve,” she writes. “But now I don’t know that anyone has the right to know what happened, least of all me.”

In that passage, she’s discussing the possibility that he’d been sexually abused. She wrestles with the same dilemma throughout the book.

In another scene, an interview subject recounts calling Smith “a really fucking good-looking dude,” to which Fisher responds, “I’m really glad you said that to him because I know he felt sensitive about the way he looked, and I think he was beautiful.”

In such moments, Fisher skirts the rules of traditional journalism: You remain impartial; you report unflattering facts; you don’t worship your subject; and you don’t weep with your sources.

I proceeded through Fisher’s account with rising ire, as the writer anguished over telling a story “no one has the right to hear.”

In a latter chapter, the author relates a conversation with Jennifer Chiba, Smith’s final romantic partner, a woman some fans blame for his death. Chiba tells Fisher how hard it will be to recount Smith’s life in a way that will “keep everyone happy.” Fisher acknowledges the pressure. “I don’t want to hurt anyone,” she writes.

Reading those words, I despaired. If I’m going to read a biography, I want the biographer to tell the whole story, even if it hurts someone.

In the end, however, Fisher and her book won me over. At some point, I stopped thinking of Nobody Broke Your Heart as biography and embraced it as memoir, the kind that reads as a detective story, like Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark.

This book’s subtitle could read, In Search of Elliott Smith. Fisher’s quest to reconstruct his life — his homes, haunts, friends, vices — becomes part of the story. Smith’s losing battle with depression and addiction fuels its central narrative. The author’s moral dilemma over how to tell the story becomes a counternarrative. Once I recognized Fisher as a character, all the handwringing and confessionals made sense.

Without giving the ending away, I can report that Fisher ultimately conquers her demons, even if Smith does not. Most important, she summons the courage to recount the ugly final chapter of his life. (I can’t imagine her publisher would’ve been pleased had she not.)

Fisher gives a thorough and nuanced account of Smith’s death and of Chiba’s role in it. Chiba said she found him with a knife in his chest, removed the blade, and called 911. But police could not rule out homicide. Investigators found two stab wounds and “possible defensive wounds,” Fisher writes. The knife bore no fingerprints.

There are several prior Elliott Smith books. I haven’t read them, but Nobody Broke Your Heart certainly feels definitive. Fisher conducted exhaustive interviews with pretty much everyone who was ever close to the man. And she explores themes that likely never occurred to prior biographers, especially the male ones: Smith’s perpetual fear of letting down friends and romantic partners, his discomfort with the more toxic aspects of masculinity, and his affinity for platonic relationships with gay men.

Fisher is a great writer, and she draws wonderful inferences from Smith’s lyrics. I was frustrated, though, at how little time she spent on his music. Smith was a musician, after all. Only rarely does the author discuss his songs in purely musical terms: their melodies, harmonies, and chords.

It is admittedly tricky to explain in writing why a song sounds good. But it can be done, and Smith wrote some of the loveliest music of his era. His command of melody, counterpoint, and chording was so arresting that his best songs would endure even if he’d chosen lyrics at random from the dictionary. But if Smith had written forgettable music, there would be no such legacy — and no book.

Daniel de Visé is the author, most recently, of The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic.