The English When They're Chirping

I was supposed to be in England today, but I’m not because of a volcano. As much as I like saying that, that my plans changed because of a volcano, the fact remains that I’m not where I was looking forward to being. A friend I’d planned to meet there just dropped me a note saying, “What a shame that you’re not here—the sun is shining and everyone is very chirpy.”

      My first thought was, “Good for the English. I’m not chirping.” But then I remembered that I’m actually pretty content. I get to be here when my son came back from his school trip to Joshua Tree National Park instead of hearing an abridged version of it days later. I get to catch up on my work. And my sleep. And I get to feel the San Francisco weather finally turn warm, and hear a fair amount of chirping around here.

      Those words “I get to” can save my sanity, when I remember to use them. For a long time I approached most of my responsibilities, especially my writing, with “I have to”: have to meet this deadline, have to write this book. But I “have to” only because I picked this line of work and either created or went looking for these projects. And compared to all the duller ways I could be making my living, being in a position to “have to” write a book is a blessing.

      I spent a long time paying lip service to “I get to” without ever really changing my thoughts or my mood. Then, a couple of years ago, life hit me with an opportunity to road test those words under truly demanding conditions. A producer hired me to write a screenplay based on my own book, Men of Tomorrow. The screenplay came out extremely well, everyone was thrilled, and we seemed to be at the brink of putting together a production and distribution deal with one of the bigger companies in the business. Then the producer went bankrupt. He filed Chapter 11, listing my script as an asset, and my script vanished into the slowly grinding wheels of bankruptcy court.

      At first I felt like I’d been punched in the face. Went through the usual stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression. Then I started telling myself: I get to go through this. I get to see how bankruptcy works in the intellectual property business, get to see what to do when I adjust my career expectations, and eventually get to see what I cad do with my script in a new market. After a while it started to sink in. In the past two-and-a-half years I’ve learned a lot and written things I wouldn’t have otherwise. And now that it looks I’m finally about to get my script back, I really am looking forward to finding out what comes next.

      One of the main things that freezes me when I’m writing is the pinball game of fears and fantasies. One minute I’m telling myself I can produce a book that blows open new doors for me and transforms my career—which means I have to make every page brilliant. The next I bounce to believing it’ll sink without a trace and I’ll be left wondering why the hell I ever decided to make this my book—which means I have to drag myself through this thing just because I signed a contract. So I keep reminding myself: I get to to do this. I get to see what it’s like to keep wrestling with this evolving book, and I get to see what happens when it’s done.

      It’s been working this week. I’m grateful to have an unexpected week at home to write my book, and I’m happy to leave the English to their chirping.

Rebirths

Part of me thinks it's cheesy to be applying Easter metaphors to my life just because it's Easter. Especially since this is the most un-Eastery Easter in my experience. It's the first year my kid's been totally uninterested in egg-dying and chocolate rabbits (he's just eager to get the comic book convention in town), so his mom and I decided just to do our separate things. She's at a bead and gem show, and I'm contemplating the dandelion plants shooting up out of the lawn and wondering if I really have the strength to fight with them today. And it's gray. And drizzly. In my bones it just doesn't feel like Easter. Not California Easter, anyway.

      But maybe that's why the metaphor keeps coming to mind, in a muted way. And since I'm thinking about writing in order to avoid thinking about the lawn (which is a nice reversal of my usual avoidance, I have to say), I'm looking at how this book died twice and both times came back. Not that it ever truly died, not to the extent that I'd decided I couldn't write it and was planning how to pay back my advance, although both times I seriously considered that. But twice the original idea proved to be untenable, and I found myself unable to work on it or figure out what to do about it.

      The first rebirth was a narrowing-down: within the broad story of Bernarr Macfadden's life and magazine empire, what I found I really cared about telling was the specific story of True Story magazine and the creation of confessional media. That's when I changed the title from whatever it used to be to The Undressing of America, got my first massive contract extension (thank you, Eric), and launched the draft that I was wrestling with when I started this blog. That version didn't die as dramatically as the first one, but it was dragging and limping and refusing to tell me what was wrong, and then during the summer, early in the period I stopped updating this blog, it just ceased to move. I walked away from it for a few weeks, talked to some friends at the Writers Grotto about it, and then turned around to look at it from a distance.

      The second rebirth was an opening up: because the thing I suddenly noticed was the title, which I liked, but it occurred to me that I wasn't really writing to that title. I was writing about a tiny piece of this national undressing, but there was a lot more I wanted to say about the battles between censors and publishers in those years, about the emergence of this whole "culture of undressing" that we've been exploring for the last century. I wanted to talk about how America got itself so overdressed in the first place and what happened in the early 20th Century to change it. Bernarr Macfadden, I found, was still in the center of the story I wanted to tell, but there were other people who had to be in there, especially the nemesis of his early years, the grand high censor of American culture, Anthony Comstock. Then the book started to roll. And so far it's still rolling, faster and further than it did either time before.

      I'm very well aware, sitting here alone on a holiday with a terribly gloomy sky staring back at me through the windows, that this version may die too. I don't think so, but I have to allow it to be. But it dawns on me that I've gotten a lot out of these deaths and rebirths. A better book, better skills, a couple of personal anecdotes I can use in the class I teach on "Finding the Story." And it's actually been kind of fun, when it wasn't horrific. So that's my cheesy metaphor for today: don't fear death, because things come back, usually better. Books can, anyway.

      Happy Easter. My kid just called and I've got to go pick him up at the convention center.

What It Sounds Like

I had the chance to read a chunk of this book in front of a live and, thank God, largely inebriated audience in San Francisco a few weeks ago. I could feel myself being a bit nervous and uncertain, because this whole approach to the book really hadn't been released from the confines of my own head yet. But I liked what I heard, mostly. This felt like a story I want to tell about and can do a good job telling. And I liked the fact that the story I'm telling is largely about the age of mass print, but I'm telling it out loud to a web-generation crowd in a city at the vanguard of the post-print era, bobbing on the whitecaps of history.

Paper

Getting interviewed can be very educational, especially when it's an interview about a work in progress. As I got ready to read a piece of this book at the Monthly Rumpus (coming up in a few weeks), Sona Avakian of the San Francisco Examiner interviewed me by email and asked some questions that got my thoughts turning in new directions: thoughts about the book, somewhat, but mostly thoughts about my relationship to the book. The whole interview is here, complete with fun excursions into other topics (the internet, Joseph Pulitzer, superhero comics). But I like looking at what poured out of me about the book itself.

      I told Sona I was going to be reading a passage of the book "about how mass publishing swept over American culture like a flood—or a scourge—in the mid-19th century, and how we're still sort of playing out the culture wars that started in response...specifically about how sexual information was the most alarming part of the flood, and who rose up to fight back against the tide of intimate revelation." And she asked, "How did you get interested in publishing history?" Which I'd never quite asked myself. But I found myself saying this:

      "It's kind of a weird route. I spent my thirties as a comic book writer, writing superheroes for Marvel and DC and creating my own odd comics for small publishers, but also writing history and criticism about comics. I'd been a huge comics geek in my teens and into my twenties, and a lot of my work in comics was about seeking my creative roots in old pulp. Marvel Comics basically saved me from depression and despair when I was 13, and for decades I was still intoxicated by the smell of the pulp and the look and feel of that cheap, yellowing paper. Most of the founding fathers of comic books were still around then, and I could go into an almost out-of-body state sitting and listening to their stories of the old days.”

      Writing about old comics and pulps always seems to make my prose turn purple, because I followed that with: “I learned my dad had been nursed on the milk of wood pulp too—The Shadow gave him an island in a brutal '30s childhood. And then I ended up writing Shadow comic books, and I had this feeling of a river of four-color ink running down through the 20th century, pumping through the veins of generations of wounded kids.” (My friend Rachel said, "I can't work out whether this is poetical or pretentious." She was being polite.)

      “So when I got out of writing comics I wrote a book called Men of Tomorrow, about the roots of comics in geekdom and sad adolescence and the violence of American life in the immigrant waves and the economic churnings of the past century. But writing that I caught on that comics were just white caps on a bigger wave—cheap paper and ink were a primary carrier of new ideas, information, values, and driving personal fantasies from before the Civil War to the TV era, and still to a great extent up until the Internet took over. Especially for the poor, the young, immigrants, and the adventurously socially mobile, magazines and newspapers both expressed and shaped people's expectations and self-descriptions.

      "And there were wars fought over them: circulation wars where people got their heads bashed in and culture wars where people were driven to ruin and suicide or swept from obscurity to power."

      Sona asked what I meant by that last sentence, which is course is what I was hoping for. One thing you learn in comics is how to write hooks. “The first part's simple: In the early 20th Century, battles over newspaper distribution routes and control of corner newsstands were fought by local thugs who killed quite a few of their rivals. The newspapers played a huge role in the formation of organized crime in this country—Lucky Luciano and Dion O'Bannion got their start doing circulation for Hearst before Prohibition made them rich.

      “Second part, I'm thinking mainly of two of the big figures in my book: Anthony Comstock, an obscure dry-goods salesman who became one of the most powerful men in American culture—the chief censor of both the federal and New York state governments—through his unrelenting battle against indecent publications in the late 19th century; and Bernarr Macfadden, a professional wrestler and bodybuilder from the Ozarks who became the most successful magazine publisher of the 1920s, and one whose influence is still being felt in mass culture, by fighting back against Comstock with health publications, sex-education books, and finally the genre of confessional and 'true story' magazines, which he basically created."

      Then back to the main thread: “I started trying to get my head around that, to understand just how big this subterranean paper ocean had been, and then these past few years it's really been coming home to me that the age of paper is ending, or at least it's changing fundamentally. So I wanted to write a paean to it, and try to open up some partial revelation of what it had been—because, you know, you can't really see how your family's affecting you until you move out, and you can't really get what publishing meant until it's fading away—by looking hard at one part of it that hadn't been looked at very much. But one part that I discovered was really powerful, the way magazines drove this whole culture of talking about our private selves and talking about other people's private selves that we're still moving through."

      At that point Sona asked me something that made a light go on: "Do you think paper publishing has hit rock bottom yet? Can we expect a resurgence soon?" I said, "I don't think paper has hit bottom by any means, but I also don't think it will be a quick or simple fall. There will be bumps and twists and surprises on the road down. Print on paper will never go away, because some people will love it and be willing to go to the effort and expense of keeping it alive. I mean, horses aren't extinct, right? But I'm not holding my breath for them to retake their position at the forefront of transportation, either."

      She asked what I thought of the Panorama newspaper that McSweeney's published, and I said that I thought "it was really fun. It's exactly the kind of thing that subcultures produce when they're fading out of the mainstream—expensive, resplendent, nostalgic. Festive, not quotidian. Rodeos became show biz and an art form when the horse culture ended."

      It hit me then that that's a large part of why I've opened the book wider and have become so energized to write it now: it's the book under the book. It's the story of some of the people in the era of mass print and their impact on the world. But the writing of it is also kind of a private celebration of an era that's now fading enough that we can start to see and describe the whole thing.

My Dream Book

This has only happened to me a handful of times in my life: dreaming that I was explaining my book in progress to somebody and discovering upon waking that what I was saying actually makes sense. So much sense, in fact, that the dream conversation gives me some understanding that I'd never reached consciously but that actually helps me write the thing.

     The dream I had the other morning may have been the most useful yet. In it I was telling some poor, long-suffering (but mercifully unreal) acquaintance what The Undressing of America is really all about at its core. What I was saying wasn't, in fact, what it's "really all about," but it was an important piece that I hadn't really looked at yet: how some people, crossing social boundaries and existing in multiple worlds can befriend such a variety of other people that they become sort of living cultural crucibles—and how there are moments (like early 20th century America) when the culture is changing so quickly and the social lines are so blurred that those people can embody an entire historical moment.

     I've always been drawn to the combining of different worlds myself: in my public-speaking bio I used to say that I was the only person every published in Batman comics and The Atlantic Monthly in the same month, and sometimes I'd add that I got onto Fresh Air because I wrote Pokemon. And I know that's much of what drew me to the stories in this book: Bernarr Macfadden, the professional wrestler and carnival strongman who knew Upton Sinclair, Margaret Sanger and Benito Mussolini; Fulton Oursler, newspaper reporter, playwright, and stage magician who knew Conan Doyle in his weird dotage and the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous in their early years of sobriety. I know that's much of what draws me to stories about New York in the teens and '20s in general, where the highest tumbled and the lowest rose up and every connection was improbable. But I hadn't really understand that that was a vital part of the book—that those line-blurring, category-jumping relationships were essential to America's psychological and social undressing. Not until my unconscious got to work on it in my sleep.

Tell Me If This Is Neurotic

I've been blogging less lately about the trouble I'm having writing this book because I'm having a lot less trouble writing the book. But I feel guilty about neglecting my blog so I keep thinking I should make myself put the book down so I can blog about having trouble writing it. And even if I don't actually put the book down my anxiety about neglecting the blog makes it harder to write the book. So here I am now, blogging about my guilt and anxiety about not blogging. Because I'm writing my book.



Maybe I should just start posting excerpts.

The Undressing

One of the students in the writing class I teach, talking about her nervousness at how her family may react to the memoir she's writing, quoted her mom as saying, "In this family we don't air our dirty laundry in public."

      I could almost feel the shudder going around the room. Every one of us knew what that meant: trouble. Whatever was screwed up in the family would surely be made worse by the prohibition against talking about it. Of course, this was a room full of writers, and writers like to expose things. It was also a room full of San Franciscans, who aren't known for drawing the curtains of propriety around our lives. (There was a mock algebra problem being emailed around several years ago: "If a couple in San Francisco walk 2.3 miles at 1.8 miles per hour, how much time will they spend discussing their relationship in public?") But still, the basic idea has become the norm: that family loyalty shouldn't trump sanity, that someone trapped in a dysfunctional situation should expose it. It's the best escape and it helps other people who are similarly trapped.

      Go back a few generations, of course, and this was still a widely distrusted idea. Go back to the early 20th Century and you'll find a whole culture wrapped around the idea that not only should we not air our own families' dirty laundry but none of us should ever air any laundry. The police and the courts would get involved if you tried to talk about sex, pregnancy, prostitution, or venereal disease in a public forum, except in the most excruciating of indirections. The dominant idea of the culture, at least around sex and family behavior, was that if something disturbed us the best thing to do was not mention it. Some argued that not talking about it would make it go away: if children never heard about sex (or alcoholism or gambling or any other vice), then it would simply never enter their minds and they'd never do anything we didn't want them to. Even those who didn't buy that idea, however, held to the notion that discussing something in public somehow places us morally in league with it. It's like Republican foreign policy: talking to your enemies gives them some sort of nebulous "legitimacy" that somehow strengthens them. But refusing to meet with them will surely, eventually, make them buckle.

      Ghosts of that idea still persist, as in "abstinence only" sex education. But even that requires us to explain what we want kids to be abstinent from. And that "only" is a tacit acknowledgement that there are other ways. And it's still sex education—attempts at which used to get people thrown in jail for years. Ultimately we have all, wholesale, embraced the idea that the nitty gritty of human behavior, the messiest parts of our psyches and our family lives, can be and should be talked about. You're only as sick as your secrets, we say.

      This is a vast change, a revolutionary change, with countless results and implications, and yet we don't look at it much. Not historically, at least, not as a series of events, of a series of billions of choices we've made as individuals that have added up to a few huge choices we've made as a culture. It's almost too vast—too fundamental and at the same too everyday—to get our heads around it. What I want to do with this book (I'm slowly realizing) is cast a little light on that change, enable myself to see it a bit more clearly, by isolating a set of stories that illuminate it. I've found some very compelling stories of a set of people who took big risks to open the curtains, and who found their lives sent spinning in unforeseeable directions because they did so; people who effected the change and were affected by it.

      The people themselves are weird and interesting, and their stories are wild, but I want us to be able to see through them and glimpse that vast story we all engage in every time we tell a truth that those old family voices might rather silence.

The Value of "I Don't Know"

Here's the opening of an early section of this book in progress: "Although the great forces of history are probably immune to the acts of any individual will and most of what we like to see as turning points are more likely, really, to be the first manifestations of movements already bound to happen, still it’s interesting to speculate on how the cultural history of America may have turned on the shooting of that rabid dog in Winnipauk, Connecticut in the summer of 1862. There were other events to the south that had a more obvious impact on the nation’s course and no doubt deserve the much greater attention historians have given them—the Battle of Antietam and the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation to name a couple—but even so, what happened inside the soul of one young man when he leveled his gun, not at a Confederate soldier but at a foamy-mouthed mongrel, and pulled the trigger would echo through the next five decades and beyond."

      In the 19th century historians argued that question a lot—do individuals change history or are they just the way history manifests itself?—often using Napoleon as their example. Clearly he was a singular man of tremendous will who drove events as few individuals ever have. But even without him, in a generation or two, wouldn't the biggest changes he brought about have happened anyway: a burgeoning England and ascendant Prussia knocking France from its dominant position; an uneasy compromise between the old monarchies and the new republicanism; mass armies; a universal system of decimal measurement; American occupation of the Mississippi Valley? Had Napoleon not emerged, the Egyptian wing of the Louvre might be a lot smaller and those little layer cakes would have a different name, but the big forces of economics, politics and population may well have found other men and events to get where they were going.

       I'm not smart enough to answer that question, but I am smart enough not to try. It's a question I let roll through the book: did Anthony Comstock shape Victorian America's extraordinary censoriousness, did Bernarr Macfadden really knock down the walls of suppression, or were they just the first surfers to catch their cultural waves? And from there the question spreads out to all of us: when I reveal some part of myself that I've been hiding because I fear the world's reaction, to what extent am I advancing the cause of personal revelation and to what extent am I being carried there by a hurtling mass of social, economic, technological and every other kind of influence too big for me even to see clearly?

      It's some of both, I'm sure. But that's the joy of "trade books" as opposed to academic books. I get to intrigue people by raising a topic we can all think about together and I don't have to pretend that I've actually figured out an answer...or that such an answer even exists.

Ionized!

The black clouds mounted high and the wind howled in from the west and I wanted to write. Does anyone else know this, the weather that fills us like a muse? It's the negative ions, I'm told, some phenomenon associated with the approach of a precipitous front, but it feels more romantic in the moment.

      Yesterday, on the other hand, I could not write and could not think. Yesterday we were in San Francisco's "summer fog pattern," a state as bleak and boring as the name. Gray sky pressing down, unmoving air, a wet chill in your shirtsleeves that somehow becomes a muggy sweat as soon as you put on a jacket. And then there are the sunny days that are so rare in this town: pale blue with a snapping wind most often, but sometimes bright and hot. Those days fill me with inspiration as surely as the black clouds, though unfortunately not inspiration to sit and pour out words. They take me outside and fill me with remembrance of things I absolutely must get done before I can write: walk the dog, pull some weeds, buy an iced coffee.

      When I was a young writer I was mysteriously drawn to the North Sea, and would picture myself holing up for a year in someplace like the north of Scotland or the Shetland Islands to write my books. I finally understand why: it was the weather. Since I've chosen to live in San Francisco I'm grateful for having at least a shred of discipline. If I depended on my rainstorm muse, and her negative ions, I'd only work about twelve days a year.

The Hard Road

My son just finished his sophomore year of high school. Something for any kid to feel pleased about, but for Nicky it was a triumph: for nearly the entire year, starting in October, he's been hammered by severe migraines. He wakes up with them, usually two bad ones a week, usually another one or two not quite as bad. The bad ones come with intense nausea, dizziness, agonizing sensitivity to light and sound, sometimes blurred vision and stomach cramps. Not to forget about the headache that feels like a spike being driven through his skull. Nearly all of them are during the school week—stress seems to be his main trigger, and he goes to a demanding school. It's also a school that puts a tremendous emphasis on showing up for class. It's built around two-hour seminar classes with ten or fewer kids in the room, so there's not much room for just doing work at home and dropping it off. He could be getting straight As in schoolwork but if he missed too many classes he wouldn't get credit for the course.

      But he made it. He dragged himself in white as a sheet with big opaque shades protecting him from the light. He got to classes propping himself on the walls with one hand so the dizziness didn't knock him down in the hall. He pushed through the embarrassment and anxiety of being a kid with an unusual impairment at an age when the last you want to be is unusual or impaired. He kissed off everything but schoolwork for weeks. There were small disasters, too, like the homeopathic remedy that made him sicker than usual (the doctor said it should make him better after it made him worse, but after a week of worse he was about to get kicked out of the math class he'd been fighting so hard to pass, so we never found out).

      But he did make it. With little drama and almost no self-pity, with just a stubborn determination to do it and some unspoken faith in himself that he could make himself succeed, he passed his classes and finished the year. Somehow he even managed to act in the school drama festival in May. He showed courage and discipline at 16 that I'm still struggling for at 51.

      My Fathers' Day present was just seeing him happy and relaxed, doing his own thing, enjoying the summer moment and not dwelling either on what he'd just accomplished or what he'd suffered for months. He has an instinctive steadiness and humility that I remember seeing in my father. (They do say these things skip a generation.) He didn't do anything but make me an e-card, and I don't care. He gives me more just by talking about the song he's recording or the stupid video he just found on YouTube than any card ever could.

      I will admit I had a role to play in his success. So did Jennie, although because she's the 8-to-5er and I'm the one with the flexible schedule, it was mostly my job. For eight months I would wake him up, would reach into his befogged brain and have to drag his consciousness up from the relative bliss of sleep into the stabbing light of awareness. I'd talk to him through his mumbling and moanings and try to figure out how sick he was, whether it was a day he could be left to get himself up mostly on his own or one when I'd have to prop him up and help lift him out of bed or one when we'd have to give up and let him lie there in misery while another absence got added to his school ledger. I kept the symptoms log and supervised the endless and futile medical investigations. I ran some interference with the school administration. But it was a supporting role. I wasn't the one with the pain.

      I'll admit that my writing slowed down during those months. I'd like to think I had the courage and discipline (see above) to sit right down and start cranking out my book after two hours of helping Nicky fight through his misery and finally getting him to school, but I learned I didn't. Sometimes it was hard not to just sit there staring out the window wondering how he was doing, or go back to all those online migraine sites, or just go back to bed, until it was nearly time to pick him up. (Maybe it's a measure of my wavering discipline and courage that I rarely made him take the bus when he'd gone to school sick and dizzy. Or maybe that's just what being a parent means.) I know it wasn't just the election and financial issues that kept me from doing much of anything on this book from October until a couple of months ago. But that's not a productive line of thought. Once I was whining about how hard it was to be fully functional and optimistic with a sick kid when my friend Ethan Watters said, "You not only can be functional and optimistic when you have a sick kid—that's when you have to be." I need to reflect back to him the strength he's showing me, and I need to apply that strength not just to the hours I'm helping him get to school but to the rest of my life.

      I keep thinking about M. Scott Peck's opening line in The Road Less Traveled: "Life is difficult." Peck reminds me that that's one of life's great truths, although it's one we don't like to embrace. He reminds me that the road through life's difficulty is discipline, and that discipline springs from love. Love of others, love of self, love of growth, love of the world, love of this hard life itself. It's what my son has been learning. Nicky's learning it earlier than I wish he had to, but I believe it will serve him well. And it's what he's been teaching me.

Schoolchildren Screamed and Cheered Upon Seeing the Wax Obama

That's a photo caption from a San Francisco Chronicle article about the arrival of a Barack Obama statue at the Wax Museum on Fisherman's Wharf. I bring it up here to...well, partly just to share one of the stranger and more delightful captions I've ever seen in a newspaper...but also to emphasize that we live in exciting times. The article goes on to tell how thrilled and awestruck even adult passersby were by the wax Obama. Not many of our recent presidents would have excited that kind of response in the flesh, let alone in wax. Whether you like how things are going or don't or (like me) feel some tense combination of the two, there's a universal sense of engagement in the present and future of the world that hasn't been typical of Americans for a while.

      Which, I tell you, makes it hard to put writing a book set mostly in the 1920s at the top of my to-do list. I'm fascinated by American history, especially those decades between the world wars. I wrote another book set mostly then, and I liked it. But that was around 2003 and 2004, the depth of my disaffection from present reality. It was a great escape, writing about the Depression and FDR and the war. Thinking about the Manhattan el and bootlegging and business deals made on steamship cruises. But ever since I started throwing myself into political campaigning and blogging last January, it's just felt...not less interesting, but...less necessary to keep looking back.

      So in moving to actually writing this book, I've had to adjust my expectations a little. I've stopped waiting for that intense, escapist infatuation with the lost world and I'm making myself look at what this book says about who we are now and where we're going. And that, like everything in this book that's felt like an obstacle at first, has turned out to be rewarding. The process that The Undressing of America describes—our first mass rejection of the "culture of concealment" in favor of a culture of revealing and exposing and making explicit—has entered a complex and challenging new phase in the last several years. Much of what's happening on "Web 2.0" is a fulfillment of the actions taken by Bernarr Macfadden and his peers ninety years ago.

      I wrote a book once about kids and violent entertainment, and something I've been asked by parents at nearly every reading and talk is, "How do I keep my kids from seeing the things I don't think they should see?" The answer now is, "You can't." When they're really little you can, sure. Or if you want to lock them in the house you can. But any normally socialized kid will come in contact, by the age of ten or so, with computers that don't have parental controls. And on the web they can see everything we wish they wouldn't.

      We're facing fully now what those publishers and writers in the '20s were first forcing us to consider: that preserving a humane society doesn't depend on what we don't let people know but how we teach them to deal the whole truth. Suddenly in writing about a phenomenon of the early 20th century I'm learning about the underlying principles of one of the big issues of the early 21st. I imagine this is what all those historians writing about FDR and the Depression in this age of wax Obamas are feeling.

Brave New Story

From the spring of 1973, when I was not quite sixteen and got it in my head that I wanted to make my living as a writer, until just about a year ago I functioned within the same basic story of how you make it in this business: You write or propose a book, send it to your agent in New York who sends it to editors, get an advance, revise or finish the thing, wait a while, hope for prestigious reviews, go on your book tour and move on from there.

      I lived that story from the time I started sending immature novels to agents in 1976 through that day in August 1981 when an agent—a real New York agent!—consented to represent The Beaver Papers, and that day eight months later when an editor—a real New York editor!—decided to buy it, and on through my sale of The Undressing of America to FSG a couple of years ago. There were times I couldn't make that story work for me, and times my frustration with trying to please those New York gatekeepers nearly made me want to give up on books. But the story always brought me back. It had been the defining narrative of the writer's life since before I'd come along—in my twenties I liked anecdotes about Scott Fitzgerald's dealings with Harold Ober and Maxwell Perkins—and I assumed it would go on being so for the rest of my career and beyond. Even when I got into the National Lampoon and comic books and screenplays because I couldn't crash those gates in New York, I was still always trying to come up with book ideas that would interest agents and editors. And when I started to sell books more regularly, I said to myself, "This is it. I can live the story now."
   

      Now, in just the last year, I've seen that story coming unraveled. It's still common, of course, and it may still be the story I live by for a while. When Undressing is done I'll send my agent a proposal for my next book and hope she sells it too to FSG, or some other big New York house. But it's becoming increasingly clear that it's not the way. The book business is shrinking, probably faster than anyone wants to admit yet. The latest scuttlebutt is that Borders Books is running on debt and when its current loan comes due next April it will, unless there's some drastic upturn in retail book sales in the next few months, have to close its doors. The loss of an outlet that big will take more than a few publishers down with it. Meanwhile, purchases of electronic books are skyrocketing, and channels for distributing those are taking forms that look more iTunes or YouTube than any book publisher. 
   

      I've been hearing more writer friends than ever before talking about how unhappy they are with their agents and how badly they want to find an agent who knows how to sell them, and bit by bit we're all starting to piece together that it isn't the agents that are the problem, it's the market. Lately the hallway conversations at the Writers' Grotto, where I share office space with about thirty other practitioners of the same trade, are less and less about how to find the right agent or publisher, and more and more about whether it makes sense to look into BookSource or Lulu or Scribd or the many other variants on what used to be the scorned netherworld of self publishing. 
    

      There's a part of me that likes the adventure of finding new ways to get my words read and new ways to make a living, a part of me that likes the idea of being free of the usual New York gatekeepers. And there's a part of me that's glad I still have irons in other fires, in case books don't turn out to be the main work of my autumn years after all. But there's a part of me that just grieves for the story. As infuriating as the tastes and whims and arbitrary demands of agents and editors could be, as much as I resented their control of the writer's life and wished there were other ways to sell my words, I guess I took more comfort than I ever knew from the continuity of the business, its rituals and rules, its punishments and triumphs.

      That continuity linked me to my younger self with his wild ideas of "being a writer" and to the long-gone writers who filled my imagination. Print-on-demand and digital downloads may well prove to be lucrative and liberating. They're just not the story I set out to tell with my life.

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.

Just Don't Tell Me I'm Good

I'm used to good reviews and blurbs on my books, mostly of the "lucid and entertaining" sort. Sometimes I'll get an "eye-opening" or even "brilliantly constructed." My books are praised mainly (as usually happens with nonfiction) for their interesting subject matter and my ability to lay it out clearly and compellingly. I've rarely gotten much praise for the writing itself, for whatever I bring that's uniquely mine—until my latest book, Men of Tomorrow. I hit something with that one, stylistically and emotionally, that made people notice. There were some head-turning blurbs—"a constant delight" (Michael Chabon), "a magnificent piece of work" (Alan Moore)—and reviews to match, as well as some positively gushing reactions at readings. All of which made me a bit nervous and set off the voices in my head saying, "It can't really be that good." (An easy argument for me to make, because the book was about comic-book history, a subject that's inspired a lot of writing but not much writerly writing, if you know what I mean.) But at the same time it excited me. I wanted to jump into the next book.

      Then the worst happened. A great editor told me I was good. And he wanted to work with me.

Eric Chinski came up through Oxford University Press, then moved to Houghton-Mifflin, where he called attention to himself by discovering Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated on the slush pile. He moved to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the most prestigious purveyors of a certain sort of damn-the-marketplace literary writing, where he became editor-in-chief in what seemed (to me) like an absurdly short time. His specialty is literary fiction, and he was once quoted in Poets & Writers as saying, "an editor's job is basically to fall in love with a book and then to help it be more of what it already is." A writer's editor, the kind you fantasize about impressing when you're twenty years old and gradually come to think doesn't exist anymore.

      Eric loved the voice and the storytelling in Men of Tomorrow and called my agent to say he wanted to work with me. He didn't want me to write more about comic books, he didn't have any particular subject he wanted out of me, he just wanted to work with me. I had some half-baked ideas in my head about the early tabloids and True Story magazine and Macfadden Publications and ran them by him—still only baked around the edges and pretty gooey in the middle—and he said "go for it." Not literally "go for it." It was one of those, "All of us here at FSG are excited about...blah blah," emails. But the gist was, if it's fun cultural history and it's written by Gerard Jones, then it's what Eric wants.Which was good for about two days of euphoric fantasies about blowing away the critics and making FSG my literary home forever and ever.

      Until the terror hit. How could I possibly ever be half as good as this "Gerard Jones" whom Eric Chinski has somehow mistaken me for?

       During the same period I was freezing up royally on "the FSG book" (as I came to call it, in a neurotic fixation on who was waiting for it instead of what it was) my office mate Po Bronson started unveiling pieces of Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children, a book he and Ashley Merryman are writing. The first piece was an article in the New York Times that basically said, "Don't praise your kids." Or, rather, acknowledge them for working hard and doing their best, but don't try to pump them up with messages like, "you're so smart" or "you're so talented" or "you're very, very special." Because a kid will hear, "This is what mom and dad want me to be," which becomes, "This is what I'm supposed to be and if I don't live up to it all the time then I'm no good." And expectations like that...well, to invoke Philip Larkin, they fuck you up. They don't mean to, but they do. Po and Ashley rolled out a lot of hard data showing that kids who've been regularly told they're remarkable tend to perform much less impressively and end up a lot less happy with themselves than kids who've just been encouraged to keeping showing up and working hard.

      I think the hardest job I've had in getting from frozenness to fluidity on this book has been shutting up those voices that tell me I'm supposed to be smart or talented or special. Because the truth is, the only reason Men of Tomorrow impressed anyone is that I worked really hard on it. It sounds cruel, but the best thing I can do for myself now is pound home the truth that I'm really not special at all. I just have a fair amount of evidence that if I show up and work I can make something that somebody will like.

New Day

A year ago I wrote about how dearly I wished I could enjoy a Presidents' Day with a President I was actually proud, and how long it had been since I'd felt that, and how it looked as though I might actually get my wish this year. My success records on predictions like that isn't especially impressive: just a few months before that I'd ventured that it looked as though my screenplay might actually go into production in 2008, and almost immediately afterward I got the notice that my producer had gone into Chapter 11. But this time, this time, I was right.

       I wrote about how I'd grown up on my father's reminiscences of FDR, how wonderful and impossible it seemed that a President could have such power to inspire his people. I wish my father could see and comprehend that we finally, again, have a president with at least a portion of that power, that we may be entering another time of national reimagining like the one Roosevelt led my dad's country through when he was twelve years old. My dad's still here: he turned eighty-eight just eleven days ago. There just isn't enough left of his cognitive powers for him to grasp what I'm saying about that handsome black man on the TV. Sometimes I think he's got it for an instant, although maybe that's just my wishful thinking.

       Also a year ago I wrote about how I wished my mother could have lived to see this election. She loved Hillary Clinton, and I know she would have loved Barack Obama too, and I wish I'd had the chance to talk to her about the process of decision she would have to go through. My mother was a feminist and a civil rights activist, and as painful as the choices of February would have been, I know the triumph of November would have been one of the great moments of her life. Her birthday is in five days. She would have been eighty-four. Her mother, her many aunts, and her brother all outlived that by a decade or more. But my mom was the one cancer chose to visit. She died in March, 2001, and so she didn't have to pass through the long valley of the last seven years, but she also missed this climb up the peak.

     The augury of the future is already beginning. Obama has clocked twenty-seven days and we're already hearing assessments of his presidency. His Guantanamo decision was stunning. Daschle was crushing. The economic and finance advisors he's assembling are worrisome. There's no way to know yet whether these next four or eight years will be a great upswing, a great struggle, a great disappointment. But I treasure this moment, this Presidents' Day, so filled with hope and passionate engagement. This alone is a gift, and nothing can ever entirely take it away.