I hope this is a GQ, but I read a review of Jerry West’s new memoirs, which were written ‘with’ some professional writer dude, and that reminded me of almost every book I’ve seen, not written by professional writers, was half-written/ghost-written whatever you call it. It was not the product of the person who should nominally be the sole author.
Ok, so I give up: what is with this? I can understand that a West Virginia country boy who plays good basketball might not be the one to write a book, but it’s more than just him, it is quite prevelent.
Back in the day, memoirs were written more by the actual people who lived them, no? Or has it always been thus? Did Mark Twain write Ulysses Grant’s memoirs?
Back in the day, memoirs were written so people could tell the world what happened. Today, this process is driven by publishers looking for book sales. (Why else would Bristol Palin produce a memoir?) As part of the desire for sales they hire someone to polish the result, make it readable, and tease out the tidbits that may not otherwise come out - but what the public wants to know, so basically what sells books.
Ghostwriting has always been common. It’s only recently that people began to admit it (by handing out “with” credits for the book, and so on.)
Most people aren’t compelling writers, even if they’ve had an interesting life. A publisher doesn’t want to invest huge amounts of money marketing a book that’s gonna be a snooze.
All indications are that Grant did write his own memoirs. He was known as a gifted writer before that, though.
Writing is hard. Publishers want professional product.
If you think that ghostwriting celebrity memoirs is something new, you’ve been suckered exactly the way that everyone intended. Today acknowledging ghosts is common because people have more realistic expectations of what celebrities are capable of and ghostwriters have been working for decades to be given more recognition. Otherwise nothing has changed.
My favorite example is Polly Adler’s memoir A House Is Not a Home. She was the most famous madam in New York during the 20s and 30s. When she finally retired she moved to California and started taking college courses, including ones in writing. Educated and now respectable, her memoirs were a sensation when they came out in the early 50s since she was about the first person to talk about that world, although the book seems tame and censored by modern standards.
She spends an entire chapter of the book detailing how her college work had caused her to write a formal history of her field, which her friends dismissed as being dull and not true to her own life. So, she declared, she threw that out and went back to her real voice and told a series of stories about the world of prostitution in an informal and highly readable manner.
Which was because it was written by novelist Virginia Faulkner.
Yes, ghostwriting is nothing new. I believe Booker T. Washington’s famous “autobiography” Up From Slavery was ghostwritten.
Still, it may be that, nowadays, there are more ways that a person can become a celebrity without being able to write well.
I’d guess that blogs have also filled some of the nitch of memiors, both for the writer and for the reader. If I want to know what life was like in Libya under Qaddafi, I can probably do an internet search and come up with a number of people posting about it. If I think that the world needs to know my life story, it’s much easier to start up a blog than it is to find someone to publish it for me.
Except that proportionally far more memoirs are being published than at any time in history, and they are one of the most popular genres of books today.
The problem is that most “experts” blogging about a particular subject assume pre-existing knowledge on the part of the reader. One of the challenges of writing a good memoir is presenting both the exciting stuff and the boring stuff in a manner that keeps people reading. Bloggers typically skip over stuff that won’t keep the pagecounts up, or stuff their readers already know. Biographers have to do extensive research and interviews in order to fill in the backstory.
Twain’s publishing company handled Grant’s memoirs, but Twain always denied that he helped the general to write them. Twain expends a good portion of his autobiography discussing his friendship with Grant and the book deal.
Rumors about how large a role Twain played swirled even before the book came out. Grant was in very poor health and died before the book came out. Twain always maintained that he only did proofreading, and most biographers (of both Grant and Twain) agree that Grant dictated the first draft of the book all by himself.
There’s a book that tells the fascinating story of Grant and Twain’s relationship… I think it’s called “Grant and Twain.”