Author Profiles Are No Replacement for Book Criticism But I Love Them Anyway

I wholeheartedly believe that author profiles are an important and worthy part of book coverage. This may sound like a shruggy opinion at best, but depending on who you ask, it’s a controversial take.

Some critics would say that the author profile is a shoddy replacement for actual book criticism and I would agree with them. Over the past decade or so we’ve seen space for book coverage at general media outlets decline overall, and straight reviews, unless they’re absolutely vicious takedowns, notoriously don’t tend to generate much traffic.

At first, books sections shunned the straight review in favor of more clickable fare, but now even the more camera-ready author profile is on the chopping block. I fear the day when newsy bullet points summarizing celebrity memoirs are the only book coverage available to the average newspaper or magazine reader.

In an ideal world there would be plenty of room for both criticism and more behind-the-scenes author features (I’m going to include straight author interviews in this category, even though those might not involve an intrepid reporter following an author around for an extended period of time and exclaiming over what they eat for lunch.) There are already plenty of writers who extol the importance of criticism, so let me be the one to make a broad pitch for author profiles.

Any great book can and should stand on its own, with only the text to guide the reader. But I’m often the kind of reader who has more questions than answers when I’m finished with a book, and I find that learning the author’s intentions enhances my enjoyment of it.

I want to consider the context in which a book was written, what was happening in the author’s life at the time, what was happening in the world, and sometimes most importantly, what else was the author reading and watching and listening to. I love to see how themes of seemingly unrelated media sneak into a writer’s narrative. Again, it’s not crucial to my enjoyment of a book, but it does help to create a fuller, deeper understanding of the work.

For more than four years Lit Hub aired my podcast, which consisted of a 30-minute conversation with a different author promoting a new book every week. I pitched it because it seemed like no one was taking my author profile pitches any longer and I still wanted to be able to ask questions of the people whose books I was reading, which is the only kind of book club-like experience I’ve ever been interested in. Putting out a new show each week for years is, frankly, exhausting and unsustainable, but I really miss it.

I also understand the other side, that there are authors who don’t like to do this kind of promotion and who feel forced to sell themselves in order to sell books. We take for granted that authors must reveal themselves to journalists to sell books, that is, if they are lucky enough to find a journalist who can place a profile in the first place. Here is Elif Batuman in her latest newsletter:

It’s like book publicity is designed to create a fiction of a self-contained person who has intentionally achieved some goal, and is therefore being elevated to some special level. Whereas a writer is really just a messy guilt-ridden ball of desires and theories, passionately wanting not to be elevated above other people.

I, for one, want to probe those messy guilt-ridden balls, and I absolutely respect those writers who do not want to be probed at all.

I recently asked people on Twitter to send me their favorite author profiles, and the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine got the majority of votes (Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah on Toni Morrison is a recent favorite for me). But many of my all-time favorites are from publications that no longer exist, like Scaachi Koul’s excellent 2021 profile of Jhumpa Lahiri for BuzzFeed, or Anna Merlan talking to Barbara Ehrenreich at the start of the pandemic for VICE, or that one time when I commissioned Sam Irby to talk to Jia Tolentino about her debut essay collection for Pacific Standard.

In my fantasies author profiles can exist as an artform alongside other coverage in a healthy ecosystem. Maybe I’m just feeling nostalgic for the digital media boom of the 2010s, or for robust book coverage in general. But I for one will always be interested in what my favorite authors have to say, both on the page and off.