“You can’t think of anything more pleasing, I guess, to a biographer, than that they would be able to look in the coffin of their subject, but I did,” says Megan Marshall, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014 for Margaret Fuller: A New American Life. Her latest book, After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart (Mariner Books) takes a more personal turn.
Hey, CNFers, what you’re seeing is the beautiful, brilliant book cover of The Front Runner: The Life of Steve Prefontaine, set to come out by Mariner Books on May 20, 2025, ten days shy of the 50th anniversary of Steve Prefontaine’s death (spoiler alert).
You can use it to pre-order from your favorite online bookseller be it Bookshop.org or … Amazon1.
We all know that pre-orders help determine to what extent the publisher is willing to invest in their talent2. I suspect you’re plenty sick of getting barraged by authors like me begging — and make no mistake, it’s begging — for pre-orders. Not only is it expensive ($32.99) but you have to then wait five months.
Anyway, consider pre-ordering a few copies. If you order five or more for your reading group, I’ll be sure to do some kind of Zoom chat. Email me the receipt and we’ll coordinate a time.
So many people make a book happen. Editors, designers, sales team, media teams. I hope you’ll consider buying it as it supports the entire enterprise, not just the little keyboard troll.
Thank you so much.
Here’s the thing: We can all agree that Amazon sucks ass for authors, but most people buy their books from Amazon. I still buy books (Kindle primarily … I hate clutter) from Amazon. I’m never going to hate on anyone who buys one of my books from Amazon. No sense in shaming any book sale. ↩︎
Here’s the thing: We can all agree that this is ass-backwards. The publisher, seeing a robust pre-order binge then doubles down on the talent. It’s a chalk-eating-weasel (horse racing term) move, betting the house on an even-money favorite. ↩︎
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.
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 TheWashington Post.
Ian O’Connor is a modern-day master of the sports biography, the unauthorized sports biography. Unauthorized is not a dirty word, though the industry needs to rebrand around it. We’ll workshop that …
Unauthorized = true journalism, no editorial input from the central figure, more likely closer to the truth instead of the central figure’s truth. It is not a collaboration.
This is the biography you want to read.
And in the hands of someone like Ian, there’s no better reader experience. Ian handled his latest mammoth figure in Out of the Darkness: The Mystery of Aaron Rodgers(Mariner Books) with utmost fairness and showed the grayness of Rodgers’s character, which makes for a gripping and complicated read.
Maddy is a special person in my life, has been a friend and mentor going on twenty-one years, dating back to a Diaries, Memoirs, and Journals class I took with her at the helm in Tobin (?) at UMass, Amherst back in the fall of 2003. May you have someone in your corner as generous and kind as I’ve had in Maddy over a couple decades.
It’s a book that chronicles the college hockey and the rise of hockey in the South. And at the heart of it is the Geoffrion familly whose bloodline in hockey goes back to the formation of the slapshot.
Blake Geoffrion had the pressure to keep the generational NHL lineage alive. And he did, though his career was cut short by a devastating head injury.
Of the many books I’ve read of Glenn’s, this one’s my favorite and it, at long last, is in movie theaters starring Daisy Ridley.
In this episode, we talk about the journey of how this book came to be adapted, the hiccups along the way, how serendipity played a role in the adaptation, and a lot more book-writing stuff you’ll love to hear about.
What a great interview to re-up. Tremendous insights into the craft of biography and the perfect way to lobby subjects about what it’s important for a credible journalist to tell their stories: Everybody gets forgotten. They might not thinks so, but it’s true. And Howard made that case to Rickey Henderson for Rickey: The Life and Legend of an American Original.
Usually after you have a discussion with your book editor, you have a clearer sense of what you’re doing. Energy. Gusto. I spoke with my editor on June 28. As you can tell, I haven’t written a word since. In fact, I’ve been sad. Like, I-can’t-face-the-day sad.
POV. POV. POV. POV. POV.
What’s my point of view in this biography? My whole concept — my instinct —was to just tell a good story with newer details from a longer lens. That’s not enough. Biographers must imbue the story with something that makes it wholly unique, looking askance at the central figure, even casting judgement. “As the biographer, you have your finger on the scale,” my very astute and downright brilliant editor told me.
I never knew creative block until this moment. I cannot crack this code of how to frame the book in a way that feels fresh and relevant. My interviews are falling flat because I’m running out of things to talk about. I don’t know how to bring fresh juice to these conversations. I thought building up certain “tent pole” moments would be exciting and great but … I don’t think so anymore.
I had a set of instincts going into this project and they’ve been cut off at the knees. And, at this writing, I have 8.5 to complete the reporting, the research, and the writing. As I wrote that sentence, my stomach dropped into my shoes.
Why am I writing this? What value-add is this for you? I can’t say there is any except a great lyric from Metallica’s “King Nothing”:
Careful what you wish, You might regret it Careful what you wish, You just might get it
I have a pal who has told me just to explain it now and write it later. My interpretation is to merely get things down on paper and worry about the sheen later, worry about the connective tissue later. Don’t worry so much about meaning but write the islands. Write out of chronological order.
Ultimately, this the Pressfieldian “Resistance” surfacing from the subterranean bowels of the lizard brain.
A mantra of sorts has helped me: Slow and steady. Deliberate focus.
This was a wonderful conversation from a brilliant writer and reporter, and a great advocate for the writing community at large. He’s the host of Two Writers Slinging Yang.
