If you're reading this, I'd imagine you have some interest in me personally or the writing career I've been pursuing professionally since 1974. That's a long time to be doing anything. Over those 52 years I've published three books and more newspaper, magazine, and internet articles than I can count, on more subjects than I can keep track of.
I'm best known for my John Lennon book, Nowhere Man. My other books are about the history of pornography (Beaver Street) and post-war Brooklyn (A Brooklyn Memoir, originally titled Bobby in Naziland).
These books are "creative nonfiction," which used to be called "new journalism." Creative nonfiction is journalism that reads like fiction and is usually written in the first person. This form of writing allows me to get closer to the truth than if I obeyed the rules of standard journalism.
Nowhere Man, a journey through Lennon's personal diaries, could not have been written as standard journalism. Because I couldn't prove that what I knew to be true was true. To do that, I'd have needed the diaries themselves and the permission of the Lennon Estate. The Lennon Estate will not bestow either of those things upon any journalist in our lifetime.
Some background: In the 1970s, I studied fiction and nonfiction writing in college and grad school with Joseph Heller, Francine du Plessix Gray, and James Toback. Since then, I've worked as a reporter, a freelance writer, a film critic, a ghostwriter, and a speechwriter. To support myself when writing wasn't paying the bills, I've driven a taxi and edited newspapers, car magazines, porn magazines, skateboard magazines, women's health and fitness magazines, and more. I've worked in magazine production at Condé Nast and worked as a writing tutor who made house calls. I've dabbled in novel writing, screenwriting, and comedy-sketch writing but have never made money doing those things—though one of my comedy sketches was produced as part of a musical variety show in Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall), on the same stage that Yoko Ono once performed "Cut Piece."
And now, at my shockingly advanced age, I'm working on another book, which I began writing six or seven years ago. It's about a radical left-wing student newspaper, Observation Post (OP), that I edited at the City College of New York at a time when idealistic antiwar activism was giving way to despair and the first rumblings of outrage-for-the-sake-of-outrage punk. What happened on OP was a microcosm of what was happening in an Amerika being torn apart, just as it's being torn apart today.
The book's title is a play on the title of a classic novel. It's a phrase that doesn't turn up in internet searches or anywhere else, and I don't want A.I. to gobble it up and spread it around until I've completely finished the book. So I'm keeping the title under wraps as I edit and refine the manuscript. My new year's resolution: Find a new agent. My old agent, Jim Fitzgerald, died a few years ago. He's the guy who sold Nowhere Man.
Writing the book is the easy part. Finding the right publisher is the hard part. Promoting it is the hardest part—because even if you or your publisher spends a lot of money on professional PR, there are no guarantees that any media organ of significance will deem your book worthy of coverage.
If you're eagerly anticipating the new book, I'd suggest this is a good time to catch up with the old ones. Read 'em if you haven't. Read 'em again if you have.
Happy New Year and thanks for reading!
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