Perhaps the most exalted practitioner of a little-understood craft, Moehringer aims, ultimately, to disappear. Ghostwriters channel someone else’s voice — often, someone else’s very recognizable voice — and construct with it a book that has shape and texture, narrative arc and memorable characters, all without leaving fingerprints. Doing it well requires a tremendous amount of technical skill and an ego that is, at a minimum, flexible.
“If I’m a great collaborative writer, I am a vessel,” said Michelle Burford, who has written books with broadcaster Robin Roberts, actress Cicely Tyson and musician Alicia Keys. “The lion’s share of my job is about getting out of the way, vanishing so the voice of my client can come through as clearly as possible.” The way she explains it to her clients, she said, is that they provide the raw materials to build a house, and she puts it together, brick by brick.
For those who see food as an integral part of healing, this is a monumental step forward. But prescribing food is not as straightforward as it sounds.
Food is more complex than any pill. This makes it difficult for doctors and patients to know which medically tailored foods are the best medicine and which suppliers can best deliver these edible therapies.
Ross Benjamin’s momentous new translation, “The Diaries of Franz Kafka” (Schocken), is the first to convey the full extent of their twitchy tenuousness. Martin Greenberg and Joseph Kresh’s previous rendering, published in 1948 and 1949, did no such thing: the manuscript on which it is based had been heavily doctored by Brod, likely in an effort to protect both Kafka’s reputation and his own. In the vandalized diaries, entries have been shuffled into a linear chronology, lewd and lightly homoerotic content has been excised, solecisms have been corrected, dialect has been rigidified into strenuously proper High German, punctuation has been inserted, drafts and revisions of stories have been removed so as to impose an artificial distinction between fiction and fact, and passages unflattering to Brod have been cut. The result is prim and polished, less like a diary and more like a monument. The unadulterated Kafka, in the new version, is less stilted and more alive. Kafka neglects to finish sentences and sometimes even breaks off mid-word. Many of his entries are undated, and occasionally long periods pass between one jotting and the next.
Among the resources that have been plundered by modern technology, the ruins of our attention have commanded a lot of attention. We can’t focus anymore. Getting any “deep work” done requires formidable willpower or a broken modem. Reading has degenerated into skimming and scrolling. The only real way out is to adopt a meditation practice and cultivate a monkish existence.
But in actual historical fact, a life of prayer and seclusion has never meant a life without distraction. As Jamie Kreiner puts it in her new book, “The Wandering Mind,” the monks of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages (around A.D. 300 to 900) struggled mightily with attention. Connecting one’s mind to God was no easy task. The goal was “clearsighted calm above the chaos,” Kreiner writes. John of Dalyatha, an eighth-century monk who lived in what is now northern Iraq, lamented in a letter to his brother, “All I do is eat, sleep, drink and be negligent.”
This book offers that comfort, that togetherness, thanks to Philpott’s gift of unpretentious self-revelation. Her first-person voice is never overly confessional or self-indulgent; instead, her prose invites us in. These essays are like familiar rooms where we feel at ease and find we understand ourselves more clearly.
As the poet has it, we are born strangers and afraid in a world we never made and, he might have added, spend a large part of our lives negotiating that original aloneness. Most of us make some headway with the struggle, but some of us get nowhere with it; we remain people who are at home nowhere, with no one, feeling like strangers to ourselves and others all our lives. For such unfortunates, the aloneness is more than a penalty, it is a humiliation; humiliation is degrading; degradation induces fear and rage; fear and rage are doubly isolating. Such a destiny was the one meted out to the richly febrile writer Jean Rhys, whose gift for language and form made her stories and novels a compelling embodiment of the permanently forlorn.
Until the late 19th century, most Londoners bought milk and cheaper sorts of fish and fruit in season from street sellers. In 1618, a Venetian visitor wrote that they did not eat fruit at dinner, but “between meals one sees men, women and children always munching through the streets, like so many goats”.