I'd worked on it almost every waking hour my wife only saw me at meals, and sometimes not even then. The published result, A Tragic Honesty, was 613 pages not including notes and index. Then, too, his life had been a fascinating train-wreck: ghastly childhood! alcoholic! bipolar! sole speechwriter for RFK at the height of the Civil Rights Movement! the subject of a hilarious Seinfeld episode! So I put it all into my book proposal and, miraculously, my agent sold it to a good publisher-with this catch: I had all of 14 months to finish my (vast) research and write a 500-page biography. Look: write me a nonfiction book proposal about something that really interests you right now, and I'll try to sell it." As it happened, I was really interested right then in Richard Yates: he'd written two of the best novels of the postwar era, Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade, one of the best story collections, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, and he was all but totally forgotten. "All your success"-such as it was-"has been with nonfiction. "Blake, fiction isn't working out for you," my would-be literary agent told me several years ago. Which brings me to how this miracle came to pass. I'm not an academic I'm just a bookish Joe who gets passionate about certain writers and suddenly wants to read everything they've ever written and find out why they wrote it.
Notwithstanding what my pal Mike claims was his spooky prescience, I never dreamed I'd be a literary biographer.
Write about things that really interest you. Book-length nonfiction is what I do, and my advice is necessarily tailored to writers who want to do pretty much the same thing.ฤก.