Brendan O’Meara: Even in Biography, the Author Can Have a Point of View
In this interview, author Brendan O’Meara discusses the words of wisdom that became his north star while writing his new biography, The Front Runner.
Brendan O’Meara is the founder and host of the Creative Nonfiction podcast. As a sportswriter, he’s covered a wide swath of events including the Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes, and Belmont Stakes, as well as several local and professional sports for Trail Runner Magazine, Bleacher Report and the Associated Press. His essays and craft pieces have appeared in Writer’s Digest, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction Magazine, and Longreads. He lives in Oregon. Follow him on Instagram.
In this interview, Brendan discusses the words of wisdom that became his north star while writing his new biography, The Front Runner, his advice for other writers, and more.
Name: Brendan O’Meara
Literary agent: Susan Canavan of WLA Books
Book title: The Front Runner: The Life of Steve Prefontaine
Publisher: Mariner Books
Release date: May 20, 2025
Genre/category: Biography
Previous titles: Six Weeks in Saratoga: How Three-Year-Old Filly Rachel Alexandra Beat the Boys and Became Horse of the Year
Elevator pitch: The Front Runner is a definitive reappraisal of the iconic distance runner, Steve Prefontaine, ahead of the 50th anniversary of his passing, May 30, 2025. It’s a story that seeks to get to the man behind the myth, of the young man who still towers, all these years later, over American track and field.
What prompted you to write this book?
There’s a long-ish answer and a short-ish answer, and out of pity for readers of this magazine and website, I’ll favor the latter.
I’m always looking five to 10 years ahead for major anniversaries. I happen to live in Eugene, Oregon—TrackTown USA—and knew the 50th anniversary of Steve’s passing was approaching. Much to our surprise, there hadn’t been much written about him from a pure journalistic point of view in decades. So, as a subject, he was ripe for the picking.
I always knew him to be a fascinating figure; movie-star looks, brazen. I worked for a few years in specialty running retail and we’d often have Without Limits, one of the Prefontaine movies, going on the TV in the background on weekends. Around 2017, when statues were being torn down and interrogated, I thought there is no statue taller — figuratively speaking — in Oregon than Prefontaine, so I started saving string for what would ultimately be The Front Runner.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
The seed of the idea came in 2017, but it didn’t take root until a chance phone call with my soon-to-be-agent-at-the-time Susan Canavan in March 2022. I had pitched her an as-of-yet unpublished baseball memoir, which she said was fine and all, but “you’re not famous, and memoirs are a tough sell. Are you working on anything, perhaps, more commercial?”
I filibustered, being caught flat-footed by the query, when I peeked over at my bookcase and say Tom Jordan’s slim biography simply titled Pre. I told Susan I had been saving string on a Prefontaine project thinking ahead three years to the 50th anniversary of his death. She cut me off and said, “I can sell that on proposal.”
The proposal process took about a year to get it right, and then, once the book sold, I had 14 months to report, research, and write a serviceable draft to my kind and brilliant and patient editor.
The arc of the book changed significantly. If I’m being honest, once the book sold, I didn’t look at my book proposal at all. That said, it was always going to be a straight, unauthorized, journalistic biography from the beginning to the end of his short life. And through hundreds of interviews and thousands of articles, I sought to humanize him in a way that got beyond the mythology and grounded him in his humanity. My north star was a quote from Jonathan Eig, this in reference to his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography on the Rev. Dr. Martin Lurther King, Jr., “We’d turned him into a monument and a national holiday and lost sight of his humanity. So, I really wanted to write a more intimate book.”
Taped that below my monitor!
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
Oh, yes! For one, I thought I’d get my second book advance payment when I met my deadline on April 15, 2024. But turns out, you only get that second payment once it passes the legal review, which didn’t happen until January 2025.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
When you write a rough draft of 160,000 words and you need to get it down to 105,000, you quickly need to ask of your reporting and research what work those anecdotes and scenes are doing for you, for the story you’re hoping to tell.
Also, even in biography, the author can have a point of view; not explicitly first-person, but, as my editor told me several times, “You have your thumb on the scale. Nobody has done as much research on this guy as you, so you can assert; you are the driver of the car pointing out things to the passengers saying, ‘This is important and this is why.’”
I often outsourced much of the commentary to quotes early on, mainly because so many of these great people in this story were so quoteable. But you soon realize you need to put much of it in your own words, paraphrasing and be a more confident narrator.
And this isn’t so much as a surprise, exactly, but even when you’re operating in nonfiction, where the backdrop and the facts need to be verifiable, there is an element of world-building, something we typically associate with fantasy and other fictions. But these real people operated under a certain set of circumstances, and those circumstances acted upon them. That’s an exciting element of biography that I don’t think gets spoken about enough.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
Steve Prefontaine was ahead of his time in so many regards, and his story is one of inspiration, yes, but also one of exploitation that we’ve only recently seen athletes claim the power they deserve. This was a novel, even revolutionary, concept—certainly in track and field circles—in the early 1970s.
Steve packed a lot into his 24 years, and maybe we can all heed his most famous quote that, “To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift.” That maybe we’ll spend less time on the trivial and push the boundaries of what we once thought impossible, that there is no shame in failure, and that there is, in fact, a higher standard than victory.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
In a day and age where we’re so hyper-connected and it’s all too easy to feel crummy about our lives/careers when we look online and see such perfect avatars of literary merit and success, my go-to advice is: Run your own race. No two careers are alike, especially now. Comparison breeds resentment and jealousy, and it’s a fuel that doesn’t burn clean.
You never know what privilege certain people benefit from. They might tout that it was all a matter of hard work but fail to acknowledge they have no student load debt, or don’t have to worry about being the breadwinner and health insurance provider of the family; this list can get awful long. (I’m very transparent about the privilege I benefit from, but I won’t weigh that down here.)
I speak from experience of comparing my rotten career path to what seemed like the rocket ship of everybody else’s. It bred a ton of bitterness that cost me a lot of time and energy better put into getting better at the work. Out of that crucible came “The Creative Nonfiction Podcast,” the show I started in 2013, which, a decade later, gave me a fairly attractive platform on which to land a Big Five publishing deal for The Front Runner (and hopefully more books). None of my heroes have my weird, wobbly path, nor should anyone behind me follow mine.
But if we lean into irrefutable, timeless skills of the craft, we can ride the currents of technology and publishing trends and find the path that works best for each of us on a time scale that might not be celebrated on the covers of magazines, or touted in those dreadful 30-under-30 lists. If you’re a late bloomer, embrace it. I’m a late bloomer, too.
Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Editor of Writer's Digest, which includes managing the content on WritersDigest.com and programming virtual conferences. He's the author of 40 Plot Twist Prompts for Writers: Writing Ideas for Bending Stories in New Directions, The Complete Guide of Poetic Forms: 100+ Poetic Form Definitions and Examples for Poets, Poem-a-Day: 365 Poetry Writing Prompts for a Year of Poeming, and more. Also, he's the editor of Writer's Market, Poet's Market, and Guide to Literary Agents. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.
