Customer Reviews

Ghosting: A Double Life

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
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This is such a lovely, lyrical book that I finished reading it and immediately started to read it again. The author may shock and amuse her reader, delight and tease her employer, but above all she displays a joy for language and words that is absolutely enchanting for everyone. I hope to read more from her, but please, no more sex scenes! The author is so transparently uncomfortable writing them for her employer that it made you squirm just reading about her imaginative expoits to avoid them. Truly a professional's professional!!

Every writer must wonder what it would be like to "ghostwrite" a book. Jennie Erdal shows us how to do it --- how to write reviews, articles, letters, essays, and novels using another's byline. A glutton for punishment, and in need of a paycheck, she agrees to write the memoirs of her employer, an English publisher she calls "Tiger." GHOSTING is a finale to the years she spent writing for and about him. She proves her prowess as a gifted writer, and one to expect more of in the future.

Erdal's first meeting with Tiger is a vivid description of a gentleman outfitted with elaborate taste in dress as well as language. She's a writer with credit for the translation from Russian of Boris Pasternak's memoirs. Tiger's purpose in Oxford that day is to purchase a painting from Pasternak's estate, one that depicts scenes from his own childhood. But Josephine Pasternak has stated that none will be sold. Tiger, with the exuberance of a gifted womanizer, replies, "She'll sell to me." And she did.

Erdal's home is in Scotland, but her job as ghostwriter takes her to London, Frankfurt and the Dordogne landscape, in France. Much of Tiger's dialogue, or monologue when directing his vast traveling entourage, is italicized in French. At times, the reader may be glad to have a faint knowledge of written French phrases. However, body language and place description are sufficient to orient one to its purposes. These, Erdal pens with ease. Her use of simile and metaphor is an excellent rainbow in the often tumultuous rainstorm of descriptive verbiage. She loves language and is not afraid to demonstrate that fact with colorful detail.

Tiger's demands are heavy. He is surrounded by a bevy of young women he employs for his tiniest whims. His eccentricities and phobias are numerous. The author is kind, however, and offers his truly genuine benevolence on the opposite side of the palate. Tiger seeks acclaim in his field as an author in addition to his publishing success. Eventually, he coerces Erdal to write a novel, with his name as author. His propensity for sexual clarity is a roadblock in the authorship process. Erdal's greatest difficulty with the book is to write the sex scenes in the manner he demands. In its final draft, the book is received with mixed, but generally favorable, acclaim.

When she is asked for a second novel, Erdal takes stock of her place in Tiger's stable and of her own changed lifestyle, newly remarried. Her second husband is never named but duly noted as a player. Likewise, the publisher is simply "Tiger." Funding of his extravagant lifestyle eventually takes its toll on the eccentric man. Funds are dwindling and tempers are short. His ghostwriter finds herself at opposite viewpoints with her employer and sees that they "began to move against one another. The finely balanced symbiosis was under siege."

When Erdal announced her retirement, the publishing empire came to an end. Tiger's long reign as mogul finished with the final close of the House door. The ghostwriter tells her story, along with his, because they are eternally linked in purpose. More from a finely tuned pen is sure to be anticipated after GHOSTING.

--- Reviewed by Judy Gigstad

This inside look at ghostwriting is fascinating and believable. The author writes extremely well, keeping one's interest throughout the book, and lending credence that she indeed ghostwrote for this famous man.

The love letter in the first few pages is beautifully breath taking! She writes extremely well. NPR did a stunning interview with her just a few weeks ago. Highly recommended!

This is one of those novels that continued on in my mind after the last page. I couldn't help wondering what kind of backlash hit Jennie Erdal after revealing her boss, "Tiger" as a zany, time-obsessed megalomaniac. Are she and Tiger still friends? Does he hate her? Is he really that opposed to poo in the loo?

I found a lot of Tiger's quirks quite endearing. My favorite being his use of the question, "isn't it?" at the end of his statements. In example, he would say something like, "I start all my girls at 5,000 pounds, isn't it?" This made me laugh every time.

An interesting study of how being a ghost writer can lead to identity issues. The author at first had a welcome helping hand, but eventually found it difficult to extricate from the influence of the person she was "ghosting". Also, a case study of dependency and co-dependency.

A ghostwriter is usually paid be be quiet about her authorship, as in the V.C. Andrews novels which have become more popular since her death, as more qualified people are doing the composing. Jennie Erdal of Scotland worked for twenty years as a non-deplume for a man, even writing his love letters. Where have we run into that before? A play, I think; certainly a movie!

He was hired initially to help him to write a complicated non-fiction book on women. Who but a woman would know how to do that; indeed, the work was so successful she completed two novels using his name. Then she ended up writing a multitude of newspaper columns under the false name. I've often wondered if our local history writer does not write his own columns, as I've asked him for more details of something he wrote but did not remember any of it. Strange, gets stranger. This non-hip person is writing about things he would never notice in his lifetime, and you have to wonder if he is just the 'front', the frosting on the cake. Once I called him to task about writing something about the KKK, of which he knew nothing; thus, I went to the small library where the Klan was started after the Civil War and copied the short history as written by the wife of a newspaper editor. It meant nothing to him, and he contributed it to the local historical society.

Jennie was caught in a web of deceit. Ghostwriters don't usually reveal themselves, wrote Joyce JOhnson, on the back cover of this book. Frances thinks it to be 'the oldest profession,' but it seems I remember some seedy occupation being called that, and the two don't make good bedfellows.

We are all aware that the U. S. presidents have all had speech writers. Kennedy's "Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You" was not his thoughts at all, but he took credit for them. Sometimes, when first beginning, women writers have taken false names until they become well-known in their own personna. Then they re-release the early writings.

She is a Scottish Presbyterian; the local an Americanized one. Perhaps there is something in their ritual and beliefs which lead these people astray. Baptists would not do that; they're not smart enough. And we Methodists would never let it enter our minds. Why, St. Paul would condemn us all to hell.