Promotional support is brought to you by the Power of Narrative Conference, celebrating its 26th year on the last weekend of March 28 and 29. 300-400 journalists from around the world are coming. Keynote speakers Susan Orlean, Connie Schultz, and Dan Zak will deliver the knowledge. Listeners of this podcast can get 15% off your enrollment fee by using the code CNF15. To learn more visit combeyond.bu.edu … and use that CNF15 code.
By Brendan O’Meara
On the tracking of the podcast, I said that Stephanie Gorton hadn’t been on the podcast in 2.5 years. It’s been 4.5 years. But she’s back! This to celebrate The Icon & the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America (Ecco).
It’s a tremendous book and one that has received a lot of positive attention in places like The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
In this episode we jam about what she learned from her first book, Citizen Reporters, to her latest, the messiness of her writing process, earning trust with the family, and superhero librarians.
Parting shot: End of the Year
This is the final podcast of 2024. I don’t know what can be said about 2024. The year started with a mad dash toward finishing The Front Runner, initial deadline being April 15.
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-front-runner-brendan-omeara?variant=43044900962338
Then it took the better part of seven months to shape it into its current, final form. It went from a draft of 160,000 words to 105,000. (I was 6-for-6 with people I want to blurb the book. A couple Pulitzer winners, all of them best sellers, titans of the genre. All of them previous guests of this show, a part of this growing community of brilliant nonfiction writers. I’ll riff about asking for blurbs another time1 … )
What were the key lessons from the Prefontaine book? Like, what’s the game tape telling me about this book so I can be better prepared to move onto the next one? To make the process better, to write a better a book?
I think I could have been a little more rigorous with making phone calls. I conducted hundreds of interviews and placed many more calls. But I can’t shake the feeling I could have done more. I’m still confused about how best to find the shape of the thing. Ian O’Connor finds the shape through interviews. I found the shape of this through the archives as the most rigorously covered material proved to be the tentpole moments of the book. Then I drilled down on the people involved in those moments to bring more detail to the fore. How do you find that arc? What is the story you’re hoping to tell? Is that the starting point? Or does that reveal itself through the reporting?
I learned you need to make assertions. You need to be confident in pointing out what matters, how it informs the biography you’re looking to tell. That’s not speculating or putting thoughts into their head, but you can call out your figure if they’re being a dick. If you’ve read thousands of articles and conducted hundreds of interviews, you can be certain you’re the expert. You might even know the person better than many because you’ve triangulated it from so many sources. Everyone has a slice of that person, and the biographer, by speaking with so many people, assembles the deconstructed life into something cogent.
Something I regret, and I knew it was happening in the moment but was powerless to steer the cruise ship, was this idea of not having enough time. Sure, I had a pretty contracted timeline, but had I not fretted about it, I could have accomplished more. I could have bought access to one extra archive2 and maybe found that extra bit of seasoning that elevates the entire dish. I wish I had done a bit more in-person reporting3. I made only one reporting trip to Coos Bay to meet with a woman who drove me around town, drove me around the running routes. But I did stand on the track and I tried to imagine the scene.
Above all, I wish I had a clearer sense of the story I wanted to tell. To this day, I’m not entirely sure I nailed it. What’s the lens through which we’re reexamining his life? These were questions that were posed at the very outset of the book proposal process and I didn’t have an answer. My feeling was let’s lay out a detailed view of his life and let the reader feel the vibrancy of a life shortchanged by one bad decision. So much of his life and his appeal can’t be neatly articulated. It just was …
He looms over track and field the way Michael Jordan looms over the NBA, the way Tiger Woods looms over golf. It’s timing, it’s luck, and it can NE-VER be rebottled. Every sport tries to recapture the magic of those figures who fundamentally change the course of the sport. Fact is, there will be never be a next Jordan, or Woods, or Prefontaine. The sport was ready to change and they came of age at a time of change that was cosmic, not contrived. These are some of my talking points that didn’t necessarily make it into my epilogue. Well, they kinda did, but a sport will drive itself insane trying to find the next and all that does is devalue everyone who comes after. So all we can do is celebrate what was and through rigor and research and showing and not telling just why it is they tower so tall.
OK… 2025 is gonna be fucking crazy … so stay wild CNFers, and if you can’t do, interview, see ya!
- There’s a delicacy this query. ↩︎
- This will haunt me to the end of my days. I missed The Oregonian archives because I misread something when I went to subscribe and I thought it wasn’t digitized. Don’t bring this up when you see me, okay? ↩︎
- Though this was further complicated by our untenable dog situation. It has imporved, but it’s far from perfect and we’re still pretty handcuffed to the house. ↩︎
