ghost writing

I once ghostwrote someone else’s autobiography. By the end of it the subject suggested we make no attempt to hide the arrangement; a sensible idea, since the book wasn’t really written in his voice. Thirty or so years later, I wrote an autobiographical piece of my own, & found myself in a similar relationship with my client. All autobiographers are ghostwriters, in that they have to distance themselves from the subject matter to be able to write it at all. If they don’t distance themselves, time will do it for them. The me who wrote WIWH was no longer any of the Mike Harrisons who experienced the events being re-told or, latterly, retailed. Long before the book was finished, those subjects & that me needed to come to an arrangement, which they did. Readers of the memoir will know it is about how complicated & multilevel the arrangement was, and about how it led to the product as seen. About how, in fact, the entanglement or interleaving of shifting subjectivities became the subject matter of the book. What you read in any book is the relationship between the writer & the content. You shouldn’t convince yourself it’s anything else. I thought about this again because of the–sometimes rather naive–furore over Millie Bobbie Brown’s book. (I know it’s not an autobiography, so pls don’t @ me; & this entry definitely isn’t about MBB so pls don’t @ me about her either.) I wouldn’t buy it for two reasons. (1) because I’d rather wait until I’m offered another kind of relationship between MBB & her material; and (2) because the thing that interests me most about MBB is how her relationship with the character Eleven worked through at the psychological level–especially the earliest Eleven, with the signature nosebleeds, not much hair, bad jacket, weird body language & insufficient explanation. An actor’s mediation of their character is quite similar, I imagine, to the relationship between writer & subject; between the medium & the ghost. All those kinds of relationships are heavily terraced & utterly fascinating.