A Mutual Haunting
“Because you happen to be a writer doesn’t mean you have to deny yourself the ordinary human pleasure of being praised and applauded.” — Philip Roth
I once took on a ghostwriting client with an assignment to write her memoirs. She regularly made her own tea, from the leaves, so to prepare to write as her, I too drank tea, and kept it nestled by my bedside for hours on end. I don’t drink alcohol, but I bought 0 ABV wine to sip while I wrote another of my client’s books—she’d confided in me that she made her most effective choices with a Pinot Noir. The glass left a ring of condensation on my lap desk, and my puppy lapped it up when I was finished. For clients who mention their dog, I write with mine beside me. If they don’t, I write in another room. Each of these are small steps to aid in my becoming another person. Beyond meticulous research, these tiny observations, small facets of a person’s being, make the client more tangible to me. While it might seem silly—we are much more than our habits—it’s a bit like a backstage makeup artist adding a dollop of color to the heroine’s eyelid: It makes the character feel more realistic, and the audience can’t tell the difference.
These days, I’m unsure what is haunting me: my clients’ work or my own. I often use one to shield the other. Typically, I use my ghostwriting as an excuse not to begin. My clients’ projects follow me, beckoning me to continue writing. Their voices cloud my brain, each yelling to be heard over the cacophony of the others’. But in my own projects, I feel a dissonance, like I’m there, but not entirely.
Prior to ghostwriting, I was a focused writer, capable of writing about one thing at a time. The structure of my pieces was primarily linear as I began my writing journey and developed my voice. After ghostwriting for a few years, it seems I’ve lost that focus in my work. My essays are amalgamations of incongruent facts and ideas that meld together and connect in many ways, just not the ones I actually put into words. I stopped doing much, if any, “meaning-making” in my work. Thoughts became fragmented, tiny pockets of language littering the document. In workshop class, my classmates began urging, Tell me more, which I perceived to mean, Tell me anything.
Each time I sit down to write my own work, I feel that the person on the page and I are two entirely different people, each incapable of expressing anything that has to do with me. It seems that, after a few years of playing a ghost, I became one myself.
I am a ghostwriter. Typing this feels strange but liberating. Like many young, Melissa Febos–idolizing writer hopefuls, I’d studied creative writing during my undergraduate years, kissed up to my TAs, and earned straight As. I grew close with my professors—being the kind of insufferable student to schedule weekly office hours—and listened to them when they said the writing world was competitive, but not impossible to navigate. And, like many of my peers, I began to emphasize the “not,” and focused on the possibilities of a life of writing. I imagined myself sitting alone in a traditional home in the British countryside, filled with its own history and supernatural possibilities, playing the role of a famous writer-woman like Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, even Carrie Bradshaw. Years of growing up in the Midwest had bred in me a fervent fascination with self-reliance—a fascination with women able to live and survive without a male partner’s support or income. I fell in love with the idea of being my own self-sustaining entity, living on the money my books earned in royalties. Others would finally respect me, because nearly everyone respects an expert in their field, and I’d be able to sip coffee, write, and meander down to the beach like I’d seen writer-women do in movies.
Becoming a ghostwriter happened a few years later, and a bit by accident: I’d quit my job at a high-end tanning salon shortly before leaving for graduate school in New York City, and I Googled “side hustles.” Writing freelance came up fourth on the list. FeetFinder was sixth. And for a moment I seriously considered OnlyFans, listed second. I scrolled past the alarming number of pop-ups, clicked on “freelance writing,” screenshotted the article, and began searching for work.
After a few months of ghostwriting, I began the M.F.A program I had applied to the year before. Before school started, I’d mistakenly believed that ghostwriting would give me a leg up on my fellow students. I didn’t know how many of them would be working writers, but, based on an answer to a question I asked at the student interview, I figured less than 40%, meaning that I had six months more experience than at least 60% of my peers. I understood that ghostwriting could be deemed lesser than, but believed that my peers would look past that notion and see the truth behind why I began ghostwriting:I needed money, and I wanted to support myself with my passion.At first, I told my peers happily. When we came to the subject of writing experience, one student mentioned her long list of published book reviews and short stories and invited me to share mine. When I did, her eyebrows furrowed, and she scrunched her nose in a way that made me think she was confused.
“I write books and content,” I tell her, “for clients.”
“I knew what you meant,” she said. She’d adopted a sort of pinched, strained expression. I changed the subject, but her attitude towards me wasn’t the same. A veil had materialized between us. Suddenly, she wasn’t so willing to talk to me. At that moment, I was attuned to what she—and subsequently, my other classmates—were thinking. Ghostwriters write for others because they can’t get their own work published. Ghostwriting cheapens the work. Ghostwriters don’t pursue art, just money. Over the coming months, I tentatively shared with my classmates that I was a ghostwriter, only to receive these comments phrased as questions.
Before, I’d believed that my work would make me a better writer, but I quickly learned throughout my first semester that it wouldn’t necessarily do so. My clients were working professionals—business people, tech executives, psychologists, and airline captains—and their projects felt detached from my own. Their voices were sterner, more direct, and much more literal than mine. Some of their voices were richer, while others felt thinner. Some felt more concave, seeming almost to echo in a bare room. As I was chasing their voices and attempting to mold their words into text, I seemed to forget what it was like to do the same with my own.
At some point during my first year of ghostwriting, I encountered a sort of mental block—a clear division—around my ghostwritten projects. The wall I’d built around these projects felt formidable, like a tall dam holding a body of water at bay. This boundary represented the absence of myself and my own experiences. At times it was confounding, particularly when my client’s projects intersected with my own creative work. Once, a client commissioned me to write a memoir about parentification and loss. At the time, I was working on a thesis on similar topics. I took the job eagerly, mistakenly believing that because of this similarity, I’d be more equipped to write about it. But when I sat down after our meetings to begin transcription, I found myself in tension with the blank page; the emotional turmoil I’d anticipated drawing upon while writing morphed into physical discomfort. My hands began to tremble at the keys, and I recalled something the client said to me. She’d told me a chilling story about her own mother, a formidable woman who’d locked her in rooms as a child. My client, now an adult, still felt anxious when she was alone. It reminded her of the confinement and all of the associated hatred and fear. And while I couldn’t relate to the specifics, I felt compelled to associate her story with elements of my own. But those elements evaporated when I began to write. I transcribed slowly, apprehensively, unsure as to why, suddenly, I couldn’t draw on my past experiences. I was terrified by my own history and the potential for my self to spill onto the page, so I erased it. My past, everything that ever happened to me, including the most harrowing details of my history, dissolved before me.
Her project wasn’t the only one like this; a similar issue occurred when I sat down to write self-help or heavily researched pieces. In these instances, I hid behind the research I did, obsessively using articles and journals to explain what I should’ve been comfortable discussing. The discontinuity was apparent in my work—my fifth or sixth self-help client left long, belabored comments in the margins of our shared Google Doc, remarking on the piece’s emotionlessness. The truth was, I, the writer, wasn’t there. My writing was mechanical, absent of any emotion or conviction, but strong, like the wall I’d created around myself.
Vulnerability, or lack thereof, is among the reasons I enjoy ghostwriting. Many other ghostwriters agree—we don’t have to agree with what you’re saying, and oftentimes, we don’t. My clients’ openness shields my own. In an era of hypercriticism toward the personal lives of public figures, writing about oneself becomes an even more formidable task. A rogue opinion, an odd discrepancy, or a dissenting perspective can fuel the social fire, and the writer can become a bubbling topic of scrutiny. In ghostwriting, I get to skip the minefield of ethics and ignore public response altogether. If they don’t like my writing or my opinions, I am free from their gaze and can comfort myself, because they’re not seeing my “real” work, or the real me.
In her New York Times article “It Pays to Be A Ghost, ” literary critic Michiko Kakutcad notes that “If the critics pan the book or mock its ‘author,’ the ghost is free from guilt by association.” And, because of the anonymous nature of our positions, we’re bound by an NDA not to comment on any potential backlash. I can tell others that I’m a ghostwriter, but not specifically for whom. I am as far removed from the final book as an oil miner and a car: When a project is finished, my work concludes, and my surrogacy is complete. The lively roadmap I so carefully researched and transcribed leaves my fingers, now free to become whatever it wants. Rarely do I Google a project after completion or check in with clients after the fact. I’m afraid that the blueprint I created won’t be the same—that the title, the structure, or the references I spent hours developing will be changed. Or worse, that it’s not selling well, which I take as a personal reflection of my capabilities. The NDA looms over my work like a monolith, a constant reminder of the systemic barriers that reside just in front of my nose. In that secret lies the thrill of anonymity: Exposure is expensive. My clients’ careers rise or fall on their words, thoughts, and opinions, whereas I’m legally obligated to deny involvement, and my career still rises, if modestly.
In many ways, this distance works for me. I don’t like questions. My past is a stew of addiction, mental illness, rejection, loss, eating disorders—things I don’t want to explain to others, particularly those I don’t know. I hadn’t considered myself a private person until I began ghostwriting and fell in love with its protective shield. My own vulnerability is terrifying, but even still, it’s not as intimidating as rejection. Through my clients, I seek validation: for my work, for my words, and for their struggles I internalize as my own. The emotional labor I endure for them is simpler, and more concise than that which I forgo for myself. It’s scary and difficult to translate my struggles into words that I put out into the world, which could then be met with admonishment, blame, disinterest, or mockery. Translating my feelings, and thus, my own pain, into my client’s projects is an opportunity. Through them, I can safely share. Through them, I can react.
But being anonymous and hiding behind the author often brings with it philosophical dilemmas. While I write, I like to imagine my clients’ readers—their faces, reactions, and answers to questions I pose in the text. Audience is among the first inquiries of my consultation sessions—who is your target reader, in as much detail as you can muster? Many of my clients, especially now, have a business background, and to them, a target reader is much like a target customer. In response to my question, they rattle off facts about that person: education level, age range, gender, race, and basic interests. I take note of these carefully, knowing full well it isn’t what I was asking for. Like the small behaviors I perform to possess another person, I need an image of my reader. I need to see them, their hopes, fears, and desires. I need to know which books they keep on their nightstand and which they keep on a bookshelf in the living room. I want their routines—do they shower in the morning or evening—and their backstory, which I equate to a trope: Small town girl running loose in the big city, desperate mother seeking an escape from her domestic prison, working father who misses his child’s dance recital. These are the questions I need to answer, and in the absence of anything beyond demographic information, I craft them myself, manufacturing an image of a person who may or may not be real.
I imagine my clients’ readers see me occasionally, through text. Every so often, as my emotions, experiences, and speech patterns slip onto the page, I imagine they catch me in the corners of their minds, the silent, all-knowing narrator complicit in the action itself. I can’t speak for my clients’ readers, but I like to believe that, despite the name on the cover, they know I’m there, present between the lines in all but name. I know that, legally and socially, my readers don’t know I exist. But, to write to them, I must make them real, and to make them real is to befriend them. As a young writer with little (or no) audience, I don’t have any reader friends to speak to. The end of a project signifies the end of an era, as well as the beginning of the loneliness I so despise about my post. My readers may not exactly be mine, but they still keep me company. When I write as a client, I imagine them perched in a cluster on my sweatshirt sleeve, asking questions about what happened, and making small comments. They’re loud, these readers, their voices like the cries of a boisterous audience.
When I write as myself, the tiny cluster resting on my sleeve evaporates, and the cries go quiet, leaving me alone in my room. The silence feels deafening. I can’t imagine my own readers—they’re intangible, like my presence on my clients’ pages. I don’t enjoy the platform or prestige my clients do, and while I’m apprehensively comfortable with this, it makes writing as myself feel laborious. In the absence of a clapping audience, or even a target demographic, I don’t know who I’m speaking to—I’m shouting words into a void, hoping something will stick. I can’t imagine them because there is no one there: Along with the readers, my relentless internal monologue goes silent. It’s a lonely, wearisome pursuit, one I often put off to ghostwrite.
In many ways, ghostwriting provides me the trappings of a working writer without exposure. My pay, clients, and steady work represent at least partial success. While my personal email is cluttered with rejection letters, my work inbox is inundated with offers and responses from real people, not automatic replies. Ghostwriting can be lucrative, as writers are compensated for both their work and their anonymity. In contrast, the stringent nature of the publishing industry punishes young writers with low pay (if any), forming a formidable landscape that is draining to navigate. So, through ghostwriting, I’m a working writer.
In an article about ghostwriting published in NPR, journalist Gabrielle Emanuel writes that “Subsuming your own personality is part of the job description.” You must set aside the self in the pursuit of another’s project. Beyond questions of authorial authenticity, or lack thereof, ghostwriting includes a more personal authenticity conflict. I am assuming the personality of the speaker, and that’s a process that becomes conflated when a client’s perspective is entirely incongruous with my own. Small differences are fine—these are remedied by my “possession” methods—but large dissensions are all-consuming and exhausting. Nothing is worse than trying to embody a voice I recognize as an enemy.
A few months into my ghostwriting career, I worked with a client whose father was an addict—an alcoholic. The client’s words were derogatory and sharp. I, over two years into recovery myself, struggled to respond calmly and coherently during our interviews, usually stammering “umm” in response to their lacerating language. I rationalized, trying to understand their perspective: Their father, a man whose looming reminded me faintly of my own dad, had been an intermittent participant in their childhood, screaming harsh, disparaging words at them during his short bouts of presence, only to abandon them for years on end. His role in the book culminated in a dramatic intervention staged by my client and their mother: In response to the ambush, he left, and took with him the family dog, devastating my client as a teen. Repeatedly, as I wrote, I told myself their words were merely the result of a difference in worldview—we are all products of our experiences. But the words they used to describe him— “junkie,” “fiend”—were too jarring, too cutting. I felt like a child listening to a parent’s admonishment, too meager, and in too unstable a position to speak up.
I struggled to embody the voice of this client and wrestled with bringing a book into the world that contributed to the demonization of addicts, whatever the justification. The ideas, themes, and events I transcribed onto the page, then edited, became a Kidz Bop version of the story—watered down, made accessible to such a degree that the story I penned wasn’t aligned with the author’s reality. Writing for this client in particular felt like betrayal—a betrayal of my journey, of my own progress, even a betrayal of my client, and, most poignantly, a betrayal of myself.
My clients don’t think of me long after a project is finished, though, once in a while, I receive an email update or thank-you card. I keep the memorabilia in a box in my living room under the coffee table—reminders of my complicity in a book. The end of a project is difficult for me emotionally. Befriending clients builds trust and improves the writing, but when the job is finished, I return to my former role as a stranger. It’s easier this way. Most clients aren’t interested in hanging out with a 24-year-old girl, and for some, I am a reminder of their own ineptitude. I also represent secrets: I know all of theirs, and they know few—if any—of mine.
Some projects worm their way into my mind. In graduate school, I would wake up each day around 5, and a certain book would be the first of my thoughts. I’d urge myself to work on it, listening to books on tape while walking my dog to adopt the correct headspace—wanting to begin the moment I got home. And, as soon as I pulled my shoes off, that’s what I did. Those stories cast a shadow over my everyday habits: In class, I pretended to take notes, but truthfully, I was mapping out chapters in my notebook, arranging scenes, and developing new material. The notes I did take were haphazard and fragmented, relating only to the ghostwriting job. It was as though I was being followed. Sometimes, I was tempted to look over my shoulder while I walked to class each morning, just to make sure the project didn’t adopt personhood and stalk me.
Ghostwriting both informs and is incongruent with my own work: While I often find my client’s books seeping into my own in some way, my work seldom finds itself etched under the pages of my client’s manuscripts. My work feels separate, and detached from the work I do for clients. Their life haunts me, and I know that my complicity doesn’t haunt them at all. It’s an unrequited love affair: I scour the emotional depths of the stories they tell me, analyze their feelings, and conclude their experiences, whereas their feelings for me evaporate after they receive a final manuscript in their inbox. When a project is over, sometimes I long after the voice I so painstakingly developed. I want to embody it again.
Despite the distance, I do feel a certain ownership in my work. And once in a blue moon, I will Google past projects to check their status and prestige. I scroll through reader reviews, internalizing their comments as though the book were my own. The pride I feel in response to positive comments is entirely my own, and the pain I feel at criticism too, is mine. The author suffers repercussions or receives praise, and through them, so do I. It feels emboldening to read comments: Though the readers often imagine they’re talking to the author, I feel the love and judgment is all really for me—the manufactured self I created hovering over the words on the page.
In recent years, some ghostwriters have bridged the gap that gives us our name, emerging from the cocoon we’ve built around ourselves and becoming realized through public credit and acclaim. J.R. Meninger, Prince Harry’s ghostwriter, is one example—apart from his own highly acclaimed work, his clients credit him, making him a sort of writing double-threat. However, Prince Harry’s memoir, and the subsequent backlash that followed, are among the reasons I refuse to do the same: Meninger was criticized for subtly structuring Harry’s life narrative similar to the story of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I, and most ghostwriters know, that most often, choices such as these are made by the client: It’s likely Meninger was simply throwing out ideas one day during the year he lived with Harry and Megan, and that’s the one Harry liked best. Though I’m glad that ghostwriters are finally receiving their long-overdue prestige, Meninger’s name was slandered, while Prince Harry collected a $20 million advance from Random House, along with royalties. Even if I’m responsible for writing a client’s reality, I can’t be responsible for what happens to the book after it leaves my Google Drive. Choices made in editing and revision—let alone marketing—are beyond my control, a fact that infinitely frustrates me.
Despite the partial success, despite the money, and the professional writing practice, I know ghostwriting does not satisfy me. Though I’d never tell them, I’m jealous of my clients, who receive the accolades and credit I long for. I resent the way they’ve taken the energy out of my own writing, even though it was my choice, and I miss having my mind entirely to myself. The validation of success I feel after finishing a project is halved because it’s their name, not mine, on the book’s cover. I’m a meticulous writer—particular and attention-seeking. The reason I try not to Google books after they leave my computer is a symptom of my own perfectionism. I long for a project to be wholly my own, from creation to completion. I ache for the readers I imagine on my shoulder to be those I know; regardless of unprofitability, I want them to be mine. My fear of failure and the comfortable protection of anonymity aid my survival, but, as a memoirist, I do not thrive. Late at night, after hours of writing other people’s words, I hunch over my own messy manuscript and imagine my partial success made whole by my publications and income. In the recesses of my mind, and only so often, I imagine myself posing for my “About the Author” headshot, wearing a sweater that doesn’t appear expensive but is. In the vision, I’m not haunted by voices I don’t recognize, nor am I haunted by my own perceived inadequacy. In my hand is a book, and my name is on the cover, in the same size font as the title.
Kathleen Kruger
© 2023 Majuscule Lit LLC
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