Fans line up for Sumner’s tale

Kim Herzig, one of several hundred fans who descended on the Barnes & Noble bookstore on 66th Street and Broadway on Wednesday, hugged Sting...

Kim Herzig, one of several hundred fans who descended on the Barnes & Noble bookstore on 66th Street and Broadway on Wednesday, hugged Sting’s new memoir, Sting: Broken Music, and did her best to catch her breath. ‘‘Oh my God, I’m having an out of body experience,’’ Herzig squealed. ‘‘I’m still shaking. I can’t believe I touched him.’’

Herzig, 34, from New Jersey, was not alone in her ecstasy. Dawn Magaw, who had come from Delaware, also appeared on the verge of hyperventilating. ‘‘It’s like a dream,’’ she said. She had been waiting since 1 am and had not slept in more than 30 hours, she said. ‘‘He’s been my favourite artist for 11 years,’’ she said. ‘‘I never thought I’d get to meet him.’’ Her boyfriend, also a fan, stood by quietly.

In an interview, Sting, 52, said he had written the book to set the record straight. ‘‘There have been a lot of biographies written by people who have never met me,’’ he said. ‘‘I always felt shortchanged by that. I thought my life was vastly more interesting than what they were purveying.’’

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Broken Music (Dial), which took two years to write and will appear at No 12 on Sunday’s New York Times best-seller list, focuses primarily on Sting’s childhood in Newcastle, musical awakening and early days with the Police. He said he had yet to process the latter part of his life fully but may tackle it in another memoir. ‘‘Let’s see how this does first,’’ Sting, who was born as Gordon Sumner, said laughing.

‘‘Writing Broken Music was both rewarding and painful,’’ he said. ‘‘There are memories about my childhood that I had suppressed, which were difficult to excavate. But it became a sort of therapy that was doing me good. I feel cleansed and refreshed.’’

He explained the difference between writing a song and prose. ‘‘In song-writing you try and condense big ideas into rhyming couplets and little four-minute bursts of energy,’’ he said.

The crowd cheered when Sting strode onstage. ‘‘This is my first book signing,’’ he said as camera flashes erupted. Another fan, who would give her name only as Anne, was upset that she did not get more time. ‘‘It was so quick,’’ she said sobbing. She slipped him a note about her brother, a Sting fan, who died two years ago. ‘‘He promised to read it,’’ she said. (NYT)