An interview with a ghostwriter

I hit up a 👻✍️ to discuss the debate around Millie Bobby Brown's ghostwritten novel. Plus: geocaching, fish biscuits and vanity fair back doing what vanity fair does best

I watched the furore unfolding around Millie Bobby Brown’s debut novel Nineteen Steps last week with mixed feelings. For the uninitiated, the Stranger Things actor and businesswoman has written her first novel, inspired by her grandmother’s life, with a ‘collaborator’ (aka, a ghostwriter) Kathleen McGurl.

McGurl is a published author of 14 books, many of them about WWII. But she’s never had the kind of global recognition as she has had for Nineteen Steps - a book her name isn’t even on the cover of.

And boy, are people mad. “just use chatgpt next time” read one comment on MBB’s Instagram. “[McGurl’s] name should be on the cover” wrote another (thousand or two). Waterstones deleted their tweet after it got so many negative replies. When Barnes & Noble shared a post about the book, a few days later, they switched off the comments.

barnesandnoble

A post shared by @barnesandnoble

The commotion reminded me of when Zoella’s ghosted debut came out in 2014. (She was in her early 20s and at that time, the most famous British girl on the internet, when Girl Online came out.) People are iffy about very young women writing books and they are especially iffy when they don’t, er, write the books. Writing about all this gives me an excuse to reminisce over one of my favourite Gemma Collins incidents of all time (there are many), where she lambasted a journalist for not reading a copy of her book, which she had neither written nor furnished the journalist with a copy of.

Ghostwriting is not new. In fact it’s very, very old, thought to go back to Shakespeare’s time. Alexandre Dumas is thought to have little to nothing to do with The Count of Monte Cristo. Some scholars suspect Homer wrote none of The Iliad ffs. (h/t Charlie Connelly for that info.)

I wanted to speak to an actual ghost about it all. And so I rung up Katherine Ormerod, a friend, journalist and ghostwriter who has published eight books in the last three years - none of them under her own name.

Before we get into MBB, I’m sure lots of readers will want to know why you decided to become a ghostwriter. And what the process of being one entails.

I decided to get into ghostwriting during the pandemic. I had just written a book (with my name on), I had a newborn baby, and I was spent. My identity was in crisis. I had no original thought! I was also reluctant to return to freelance journalism, my career of two decades, because my childcare often cost more than I earn writing a piece. I wanted to keep writing and I wanted to keep earning through my writing, but I had none of my own stories to tell at that point.

So you decided to tell other peoples for them.

There are so many people who have had incredible lives, but who struggle to put them down on paper. I have written for a lot of people who are neurodivergent. One of my authors had ADHD. She had this rich poetry to her spoken word and she could edit beautifully - moulding my words into her own - but she couldn’t deal with a blank page. I’m so proud that I get to be involved in telling their stories.

That said, it was rough at the beginning. I worked on three different proposals - all unpaid - before I was given my first ghosting job. You have to have chemistry with your subject. After all, they’re going to have your dictaphone in their face for 30+ hours.

The difference, of course, is that you are ghosting memoirs, not fiction. The controversy around MBB appears to be, in the main, two-fold: firstly, that if she can’t write a novel, then she shouldn’t publish one. And secondly, that celeb-led publishing (or ‘vanity’ publishing) is destroying the industry. Distracting from genuine emerging literary talent, etc etc. Thoughts?

There’s such a misconception about how much money publishing houses make from books. If you want the unknown literary debuts to be published, if you want books to continue being published full stop, publishing houses need to get their money from somewhere. Nineteen Steps isn’t ‘stopping’ debuts get a look-in. It’s funding them! Publishing - like all of the arts - is a business.

And it needs its commercial enterprises. Nineteen Steps will sell a ton of copies (MBB has over 63m followers on Instagram) but the reviews are savage. (And I’d argue that some of them revel in being savage.) I have only read the first few pages of Nineteen Steps, but those pages are not, to be fair… spectacular.

That may be the case. Literature is a broad church. I hate that argument about how books are being watered down by these celeb books - there’s room for all types of books. That kind of mindset is just snobbery. Personally, I like a varied diet. I like McDonalds and I like Michelin stars.

And one does not threaten the existence of the other. So should McGurl’s name be on the front of Nineteen Steps then?

I think that as soon as a ghost is identified, then their name should be either on the book or prominently inside the book. They quite literally aren’t a ghost anymore. If you have to take the public flack, then you deserve the public recognition. It’s a bit like with Spare. There were so many articles about the ghostwriter, J. R. Moehringer. He was famous before for writing Andrew Agassi’s memoir and a memoir about his own father, so now he is “the difficult father” writer. He has spoken publicly about the struggles he and Harry had writing the book. For me, that feels very much like a co-written book. In which case, there should be two names of the front.

Maybe he didn’t mind because he got, according to Page Six, a million dollars for ghosting it… Back to MBB - she put up a picture of McGurl. She tagged her on Instagram. She involved her in the promotional circuit - they have done events together. She is very, very clearly crediting McGurl for her work and they seemingly have quite a sweet relationship.

milliebobbybrown

A post shared by @milliebobbybrown

I guess you wouldn’t know this if you’re just looking at the book in a bookshop, though. And that’s the biggest argument I’ve seen emerging: that if McGurl wrote the book, then her name should be on the cover - as you’ve suggested with Moehringer. Do you ever wish your name was on a book?

Absolutely not. That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what a ghost is. We are hired to do a job anonymously. And I want that! The whole reason I do this job is because it’s an uncancellable job. I do a lot of work where my face is plastered all over it. With ghostwriting, I can put twenty years of professional work to use and it’s entirely protected. That’s why I also don’t believe that we should get paid the same as the author, which is another argument I’ve seen. We don’t have to do any of the promotion. We don’t have to take any of the flack!

That said, McGurl has been named and has taken part in the promo etc. So yeah I think there’s an argument that she should be named as co-writer on the book.

That’s true. Everyone I have ever interviewed who has written a book - from the unknown debut novelists to the big, big, 30-year-career hitters - has said that the most eviscerating part of writing a book, is promoting it. Now, how do you feel about the term ‘collaborator’ rather than ‘ghost-writer’?

Sometimes it is a collaboration. We don’t know how involved MBB was with the writing. Maybe she was editing every page. With every single book I’ve written, I’ve had a different relationship with the author. (I call myself the ‘writer’, and the subject the ‘author’, as it’s their name on the cover). I once had an author who got a book deal and was so entirely hands-off, I’m not sure they even read the book I wrote. I think they did? But I’m not sure. Conversely, I’ve worked with a subject who re-wrote everything I sent them. They just needed the raw material, in order to tell their story. I ended up just being an editor on that book.

You have to remember, that with or without a ghostwriter, there are so many people involved in writing a book: an editor, a publisher, a copy-editor, possibly a sensitivity reader and many more.

What about the argument that if you don’t have time to write a book, you shouldn’t be publishing a book? For EG, as Nancy Durrant pointed out in The Evening Standard, Naomi Campbell said that she did not have time to write her ‘90s novel, Swan. Haven’t read it, quite want to now.

I haven’t read it either, but my argument for that one is that there weren’t many young women of colour selling books in the ‘90s. By having Naomi out there with a book in fiction, that’s how you create role models. It’s telling stories that aren’t historically getting told and there’s real value in that.

That’s a really thoughtful point. To bring it back to Nineteen Steps, I think this is a story that should be told. I had never heard of the Bethnal Green Tube Disaster and it was the largest single loss of civilian life during World War II. A lot of people will now know about that devastating tragedy, because of Nineteen Steps.

I want to end by asking you, have you ever worked with an author who pretended she didn’t have a ghostwriter?

I wrote one book where the author was very, very vocal about writing it.

Was that annoying?

Not at all! I signed a contract, enabling them to do exactly that. Having published my own book, having to market it, having every inch of you scrutinised - it’s just such a relief to meet the deadline, turn around and walk away.

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BITS

journalism, memes, newsletters, pods

fyi if this is your fave part of Books+Bits, a portion of Extra Bits went out last week. Thanks to everyone who fed back that they wanted that! I’ll do another one soon-ish.

There’s a new episode of Book Chat out feat. two books with absolutely nothing in common: Home-Cooking, Laurie Colwin’s iconic food memoir (which changed the way people wrote about food) and Augusttown by Kei Miller, which neither Bobby or I had heard of when he found it in a charity shop but which we were both blown away by. (Reading Toni Morrison for our next episode immediately after, you could feel the synergy between the two authors). Worth a listen just to hear about one (only one) of my worst culinary disasters ever, forever dubbed “fish biscuits” by my traumatised husband. As ever, please do subscribe, rate and review - it helps our little re-reading project find ears.

Speaking of Book Chat, this is how Bobby says that I sit at my desk. He is not wrong.

just call me Prawndora [source unknown]

Fave thing I learned about in the last week is Geocaching, via my sister. My daughter was about to take home a tiny black pellet she’d retrieved from the belly of a large oak, as her found treasure, when my sister opened it up, showed us the tiny scroll, and explained that it was a geocache. I think my kids are a little too young for it, but for 6/7 and over, it’s such a nice thing to do on rambles and a great way to get little sofa slugs outside.

from geocaching.com

There’s been a recent slew of pieces on the with-child/child-free divide. Allison P. Davis wrote this for New York mag about how her friendships had been ruined by “adorable little detonators” which exploded the internet a little less than when she interviewed Meghan, and then Anne Helen Petersen wrote this for Culture Study and Jessica Grose wrote this for The New York Times. Another great piece from earlier this summer (not in response to Davis) is this one by Jenny Mustard for The Guardian. There’s food for thought in all of them (even in Davis’s deliberate provocation) especially if you’re ambivalent about kids and want to read around the topic.

For a while it felt like VF had lost its longread magic - in hindsight I think it was a new editorship settling down. Whatever it was, it’s back, with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s War of The Rosé, by Mark Seal. I’m always staggered how VF gets such reputable people on record for these pieces - the sources in this one are impeccable. It’s a fascinating and very sad story about how the Jolie-Pitts (with a lot of help) created - and were destroyed by - the world’s No.1 rosé.

shameless work by Brad Pitt/ undeniably delicious wine

In the last few years I’ve come to value Zadie Smith’s talking - via podcasts and live events - the most of all of her work. To promote her new historical novel, Fraud, Smith went onto Annie Mac’s podcast, Changes, and talked more than I’ve heard her talk before about her personal life. (They very freely admit that they are close friends - which I imagine is part of why Smith agreed to do it.) I loved what Smith had to say about being an author (and hating the very things around it that some people envy - the literary festivals and the awards), being a parent and the nobility of housework. I don’t listen to many (any) podcast episodes twice, but I will be re-listening to this one.

I doubt I need to tell any of you to watch this Dispatches documentary from last week, but incase you haven’t seen it, it’s a hideous, necessary and excellent piece of investigative journalism by Rosamind Urwin and The Sunday Times/ Channel 4 about Russell Brand. TW: sexual assault.

I’ve just signed up for the Shelterbox Book Club. For £10 p/m, you receive a book every six weeks inspired by the people and places hit by disaster and in turn, your donation helps the charity Shelterbox provide emergency shelter for those people left homeless. A way to read more globally, while helping others.

I cannot deal with the loveliness of this [source unknown]

As someone raising small children, I found this fascinating. Food - and how to teach kids about eating - is a minefield. I’m grateful for dieticians like Laura Thomas who assiduously de-bunk the myths and cutesy fables around food.

I’m yet to read the New Yorker longread on Elon Musk by Ronan Farrow (I feel like I need a cold flannel and a dark room on hand) but I really recommend this piece in The Guardian by David Runciman, who spent an entire summer following everyone Musk follows on Twitter (he refuses, quite rightly, to call it X.) It’s worrying and surprising and very (very) occasionally, touching.