Not Exactly an Apology

My new biography of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's love life, Longfellow in Love, has been out about two months.  Every day I have to fight off the impulse to apologize for it.

The first reason is because the paperback book runs to 261 pages (the notes, bibliography, and index swell it up to 287), yet it costs $45.  The publisher sets the price of course, so I'm not at all responsible, but it's clearly steeper than I'd like it to be.

The second reason is a tad more complicated.  I know my friends and relatives would like to encourage me, but if they can get past the price, they are still looking at a nonfiction title that most of them pass up for books on the fiction list.  And the ones who do read nonfiction, probably are not inclined to biography.  And the ones who do read biography might not want to read about a dead white male poet whose reputation took a nosedive in the 20th century.

So I think many of my friends and relatives will read the book, if they can manage it at all, as a dreary homework assignment.  That is very disappointing.  But there is good news too.

I wrote the book as narrative nonfiction, which means it is driven by fiction techniques, like not revealing the story until the end.  Like building suspense.  Like resolving conflicts.  Like developing characters who speak to each other in words taken directly from their letters and journals.  Like building to a climax, two of them in fact. Like consciously trying to entertain in the story telling.  The substructure is built on dependable scholarship, but the book is written in a narrative style, not an academic one.

My hope is that any reader who picks this book up (friends and relatives included) will be pleasantly surprised at how well it moves along from page to page, chapter to chapter, start to finish.

No need for an apology there.