Okay, I wasn’t there when Gwyneth Paltrow did or didn’t write her cook book, My Father’s Daughter: Delicious Easy Recipes Celebrating Family & Togetherness, but I have a hunch about what happened.
The way Julia Turshen is quoted in the New York Times, the detail with which she is introduced in the piece as someone who’s about to write a second book with Gwyneth after the success of the first, gives me the impression that Julia Moskin got it right, and Gwyneth’s denial that she had help is the same kind of bullshit I have had to deal with from one ghostwriting client or another.
It could be a problem of semantics. “Ghostwriter” is maybe used too broadly these days. Although I’m not sure what word would be agreeable to celebrities who want to give the impression - and believe, really - that they wrote their books all by themselves.
“Ghostwriter” is a misleading term. One client referred to me as a “memoir midwife,” and that feels pretty accurate. Sometimes it feels more akin to what I imagine being a surrogate mother is like. In the end, I am ultimately delivering someone else’s story, not my own creation. For that reason, I never put my name on anyone’s book. Instead, it’s usually in my contract that I get the first acknowledgement, and that it’s worded in such a way that people in publishing will know what my role was. It’s usually something like, “I’d like to thank Sari Botton for helping me find the words,” or for “helping me give voice to my thoughts.”
“Ghostwriter” gives people the idea that I have some kind of magical powers, that I’m able to read client’s minds or something, and then write their book using only my own words. But it’s nothing like that, at least not for me. In my work it’s rare for me to simply interview a person and then write their book using a whole different collection of words than they did. I do some of that, but more often I use many of the same words that came out of their mouths, just in a different order, surrounded by other words. I move whole pieces around for better storytelling. I remove boring expository chunks, and try to draw more interesting anecdotes from them to replace those.
I also get clients to “free write” bits for me, without worrying about spelling, grammar or sentence structure. Sometimes people reveal more when they are in a room by themselves, writing privately, than when they are sitting and talking with some liberal hippie their agent hired to help them write their book when they felt like they could totally have just done it themselves because they wrote that really great speech that all the other parents loved that one time. I find some clients also tend to remember and capture more details when they write things down and email them to me.
After they’ve written those pieces for me, I incorporate them with what came out of the transcriptions of our interviews. That synthesis is really hard work. Even if I were to use only words clients spoke and emailed to me, which is never the case, it would still be a really hard job putting those words together in way that yielded something readable and interesting.
So maybe Gwyneth uttered or typed every one of the words in her cook book. But I doubt strongly she put it all together without a great deal of Turshen’s help. No, fuck “help.” I doubt she did it without Turshen’s hard work.
At the very least, it seems to me the book was a collaboration between Turshen and Paltrow. But it’s probably in Turshen’s contract that she can’t claim to have worked on it. I hope she’s not penalized financially or otherwise for this potential breech of contract.
It’s shitty enough having Gwyneth publicly deny her work on the book. I know that feeling. It’s happened to me.
I guess I can see where celebrities - especially ones who went to fancy Manhattan private schools - would perceive a stigma in needing a ghostwriter. In the case of one of my clients, I’ve since realized she had this idea that if she admitted she had help with anything, she would be seen as incompetent.
I should have seen it coming the first time I interviewed her. We were talking in the living room about whether her son needed to be on a special diet. She said she didn’t have the wherewithal to get him to change the way he ate. There was no way she’d be able to get him to eat gluten-free. “Tonight, I’m making spaghetti for the whole family,” she said. “I can’t imagine what he’d do if he couldn’t have any of it.”
We wrapped up interviewing at about 6 pm, and then walked into the kitchen - where there was a woman in an apron, making spaghetti. “Oh my god,” I thought, “my client thinks she’s making spaghetti by having a servant do it.”
I remembered that incident when friends alerted me about my client saying in interviews that her ghostwriter was fired after the first chapter was unsatisfactory, that she wrote the whole thing all by herself in five weeks. As if! (Yup. She had a ghostwriter, too. Not me, though.)
I cried when I heard that. And then I thought about all the babysitters and nannies that in the book she denied having. I figured they were all having a good cry, too.
