"Publishers Fret Over Obama’s ‘Failure to Perform’/Michelle finished her book. Why is Obama having trouble living up to his part of their lucrative contract?"

Headline at American Spectator.

Contracts that come with a reported $65 million advance, such as the one signed by Barack and Michelle Obama in February 2017 with Penguin Random House (PRH), will inevitably include [a "failure to perform" clause].... At the time the Obama deal was made in early 2017, insiders were telling Publishers Weekly that books by both Michelle and Barack would be released in fall 2018. Michelle’s book, Becoming, was released by PRH’s Crown division on schedule in November 2018 and has exceeded expectations. Barack’s book will be released at least two years behind schedule with no publication date in sight....

Barack Obama, in fact, has a history of failing to perform. A 2006 article by publisher Peter Osnos shed some unflattering light on Obama’s deadline problems. As Osnos related, a 1990 New York Times profile on the Harvard Law Review’s first black president caught the eye of hustling young literary agent Jane Dystel. Dystel persuaded Obama to put a book proposal together, and she submitted it. Poseidon, a small imprint of Simon & Schuster, signed on and authorized a roughly $125,000 advance in November 1990 for Obama’s proposed book.

With advance in hand, Obama repaired to Chicago, where the University of Chicago offered him a stipend, benefits, and an office to help him write what Obama told the administrators would be a book on race and voting rights....

In November 1992, he and Michelle married. After their honeymoon, in order to finish without interruption, Obama decamped to Bali for a month.... Simon & Schuster lost patience. In the summer of 1993, the publishing house noted his failure to perform and cancelled the contract. According to Osnos, the publisher asked that Obama return at least some of the advance. According to biographer Christopher Andersen, Obama had spent $75,000 of the advance and could not pay it back. The publisher let Obama keep the money only after he pled poverty due to “massive student loan debt.”

As Osnos told the story, Dystel did not give up. She solicited Times Books, the division of Random House at which Osnos was publisher. He met with Obama, took his word that he could finish the book, and authorized a new advance of $40,000.

In addition to his many distractions, Obama’s Luddite approach to writing slowed him down further. “I would work off an outline — certain themes or stories that I wanted to tell — and get them down in longhand on a yellow pad,” he would later relate to Daphne Durham of Amazon. “Then I’d edit while typing in what I’d written.”

In late 1994, Obama finally submitted his manuscript for publication, now a memoir titled Dreams from My Father.

How is it that "a slow writer and sluggish student who had nothing in print save for a couple of 'muddled' essays" had "suddenly found his mojo to write" such a lovely memoir? Well, maybe he actually took writing seriously and wrote like a literary person! But this is American Spectator, so they're going with the account in the 2009 book, "Barack and Michelle: Portrait of a Marriage": he got a ghostwriter, Bill Ayers.

If that's really how Obama gets it done, then why isn't the current book done on schedule? The Spectator article notes Obama's other book, "The Audacity of Hope," (2006), a book that perhaps no on believes Obama wrote on his own: "The New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani observed that portions of Audacity sounded like 'outtakes from a stump speech,' and she was righter than she knew. At least 38 passages from Obama speeches delivered in 2005 or 2006 appear virtually word for word as ordinary text in Audacity."

If the new book was going to be another "Audacity of Hope," it would be done. I think it's supposed to be more of a memoir of his White House years, which makes it like "Dreams from My Father" in literary aspiration, but much more tightly bound up with demands to recount the historical truth. Surely, he has people helping him, but there's also a lot of pressure to come across as a literary genius... and the same literary "genius" who wrote "Dreams from my Father." It must be hard working with ghostwriters under the pressure to replicate the earlier ghostwriter (or Obama himself) — whoever it was who at far greater leisure crafted the language of "Dreams."

I'd like to read a memoir about trying to write this memoir. Something meta. Or why can't some random literary genius make up a memoir like that? I'm giving this post my "unwritten books" tag, because I'm not going to do it. I just have the idea. The story of Barack, Michelle, Sasha, and Malia enduring the lockdown wherever they are — Martha's Vineyard? — and trying to get their projects done. Sort of like "The Shining" — you know, the wife thinks he's writing an important book, but he can't get a damned thing done, and it's wearing on him. Eventually, there's discord. Michelle goes public with her enigmatic self-diagnosis of "low-grade depression," and maybe that hurts Barack's vanity. Your husband is Barack Obama — the nation's mood elevator — how can you be sad?

It's hard to picture Obama getting mad in a family setting, but that's why somebody else needs to write this book.