This Is a Good Thing. Really.

There was a time when the news that someone else was already writing a book about Bernarr Macfadden would have paralyzed me.

      See, I'm contracted to write this book called The Undressing of America for FSG, about how the "culture of concealing" was overthrown in the early Twentieth Century by the "culture of revealing"—more specifically, how that change was manifested through the creation of True Story magazine in 1919 and the subsequent explosion of tabloids, confessionals, movie gossip, true crime, and all the rest. Bernarr Macfadden was the publisher of True Story, and a bridge from the radical health-and-freedom movements of the late Victorian years (nudism, body building, sex ed when it was illegal, planned parenthood when it was really illegal) to the sensationalism that overtook and drove forward the love of explicitness that distinguished the '20s and just keeps snowballing through the present. (If you want to finesse a point, you can call him the father of reality media.) He's inescapably significant to the story, and for quite a while I thought my book would be something of a life story of Macfadden, all the big cultural developments to be viewed through him.

      To be honest, I wasn't so very interested in writing a life story of Macfadden. His was a fascinating life, but what drew me to the subject were other elements. It just seemed like that's what the book should be. So had the news hit me any time in the past year that Harper would be bringing out Mark Adams's Mr. America: How Muscular Bernarr Macfadden Transformed the Nation through Sex, Salad and the Ultimate Starvation Diet  in March 2009, my heart would have dropped through the floor. Especially since there was once a chancemy book might come out in late 2009. Somehow "the second Bernarr Macfadden biography of the year" doesn't sound look good opening buzz.

      But a funny thing happened on the way to Mr. America. Actually a lot of things, some not so funny: my son's struggles with chronic migraines, for one, which was the first big reason I didn't start on The Undressing of America when I planned to. But there were a lot of other things, some really too minor to explain my stalling the book, clearly stand-ins for an aversion to doing the work. I just couldn't get my head clear on what this book was supposed to be or why I was supposed to be excited about writing it. By early this year I'd carved out some time and declared my intention either to write this book or give it up. But still I stalled and avoided. Until a friend sent me an email with the subject line "Seen this?" and a link to a review of the new Bernarr Macfadden biography.

      I'll confess to some dread and anxiety. For a minute I even kicked myself for not having written my book more quickly, before I reminded myself that even by the original plan my publication would have fallen after Mark's book. That's when I began to realize what a gift this was—not only Mr. America, which turned out to be a thorough and delightful biography, but the delays and procrastinations that enabled me to read it before getting deep into my own book.

      My editor's first reaction to the news was, literally, "Yikes!" But within a couple of days he was suggesting exactly what I was thinking, and what I think I had been groping toward all along: it's essential now that my book focus not on the long life of Bernarr Macfadden but on the cultural phenomena themselves, on the perfect storm of the '20s, on all the peculiar characters who swirled around Macfadden and competed with him and tried to shut him down. Especially since Mark's book focuses mainly on Macfadden's first career as a fitness and diet guru, with only a passing mention of his time as a publishing maven. Suddenly William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Medill Patterson, Fulton Oursler, and Anthony Comstock have much bigger roles. And suddenly I was able to turn out a detailed chapter breakdown in a hurry that my editor approved in an instant.

      When things like this happen I find myself believing that some sort of literary God is watching out for my career—a comforting thought, especially when I tend to great every stumbling block with dread and self-criticism. Although why He decided that my Men of Tomorrow screenplay, the best thing I have ever written by far, would be trapped for two years in my producer's Chapter 11 nightmare has yet to be revealed.