At the outset, I do what ghostwriters do. I listen. And eventually, after the callers talk themselves out, I ask a few gentle questions. The first (aside from “How did you get this number?”) is always: How bad do you want it? Because things can go sideways in a hurry. An author might know nothing about writing, which is why he hired a ghost. But he may also have the literary self-confidence of Saul Bellow, and good luck telling Saul Bellow that he absolutely may not describe an interesting bowel movement he experienced years ago, as I once had to tell an author. So fight like crazy, I say, but always remember that if push comes to shove no one will have your back. Within the text and without, no one wants to hear from the dumb ghostwriter.
I try not to sound didactic. A lot of what I’ve read about ghostwriting, much of it from accomplished ghostwriters, doesn’t square with my experience. Recording the author? Terrible idea—it makes many authors feel as if they’re being deposed. Dressing like the author? It’s a memoir, not a masquerade party. The ghostwriter for Julian Assange wrote twenty-five thousand words about his methodology, and it sounded to me like Elon Musk on mushrooms—on Mars. That same ghost, however, published a review of “Spare” describing Harry as “off his royal tits” and me as going “all Sartre or Faulkner,” so what do I know? Who am I to offer rules? Maybe the alchemy of each ghost-author pairing is unique.
To some, Eggers’ approach to publishing might feel archaic. Quixotic. Arcane. And, well, it might be.
But when you hold that hefty, impractical wood-bound book in your hand, with its gilded edges and gold foil–stamped spine, you can’t help but feel that he was right all along.
In today’s more promising climate, a ‘fighting spirit’ appeals to many people with cancer. For some cancer patients I’ve known, it’s been important to say – and for those around them to hear – that they’re trying to summon their emotional and physical powers, to do whatever they can to live longer. Some deploy combative phrases to give themselves pep talks (‘You can beat this’) as encouragement before and while receiving cancer treatment, even though they know full well that the outcome is beyond their control.
Yet hawkish words – talk of ‘battling’, as opposed to, say, ‘coping with’ cancer – have fallen out of favour among physicians, psychologists and patient advocates. As a practising oncologist I avoided that sort of language. War metaphors seemed inapt for describing research or cancer care. And I recognised this risk: if a treatment doesn’t work, if a tumour progresses, patients who have been led to believe that they’re supposed to put up a fight against cancer may blame themselves, mistakenly thinking that they lacked sufficient strength or will, when it’s the treatment that failed.
But despite birth’s recurring presence in the written record, and despite rumors of some long-lost matriarchal age and society that privileged a feminine divine and saw birth as the primary axis of imaginative, political, and social power, there is little evidence that birth was ever the foundational experience that any culture organized itself around. Just as women have been seen, in Simone de Beauvoir’s phrasing, as “the second sex,” birth has a sense of secondariness about it; it has long hovered in death’s shadow, quietly performing its under-recognized labor. Death has been humanity’s central defining experience, its deepest existential theme, more authoritative somehow than birth, and certainly more final. It is a given that humans are mortal creatures who must wrestle with their mortality, that death is the horizon no one can avoid, despite constant attempts at evasion and postponement and despite the recurring fantasy of immortality. Birth, meanwhile, is what recedes into a hazy background, slipping back past the limits of memory, existing in that forgotten realm where uteruses, blood, sex, pain, pleasure, and infancy constellate.
Published in the run-up to summer, Emma Cline’s second novel is probably what people mean when they talk about a “beach read”. Whereas her 2016 debut, arrived on a tsunami of hype and hazy lyricism, The Guest is the more controlled work of a fine talent maturing on its own terms. Sultry and engrossing, with a note of menace, it’s a gorgeously smart affair whose deceptive lightness conceals strange depths and an arresting originality.
There are questions threaded through every intimate relationship, woven deeply into the fabric of a shared history. They take different forms and use different words, but they boil down to a stark inquiry: How far would I go to save this relationship? When things in the relationship are going well, these questions never come to the surface.
When things are off track, though …
But I found people with weighty stories were still willing to talk in China. The problem was they themselves had yet to sort through and make sense of China's turbulent past, and they struggled to articulate it in full to an outsider.
These conundrums — the slipperiness of memory and the intractability of talking about trauma — are at the heart of what makes Tania Branigan's book Red Memory: Living, Remembering, and Forgetting China's Cultural Revolution so compelling.