San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
BEHIND PRINCE’S MEMOIR, A VITAL AND INVISIBLE CRAFTSMAN
Ghostwriters like J.R. Moehringer help celebs tell their tales
The cover of Prince Harry’s new memoir has a simple design: a close-up of his familiar face, looking calm and resolute behind a ginger beard. His name is at the top of the frame, and the title, “Spare,” is at the bottom.
What the cover does not include is the name of the book’s ghostwriter, J.R. Moehringer.
Perhaps the most exalted practitioner of a littleunderstood 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.
“You own the bricks,” she said she tells them. “But you — and there should be no shame in this — don’t have the skill set to actually erect the building.”
The process can vary widely from writer to writer and project to project. There are writers who push hard to have their names on the cover, and those who never do. Sometimes writers who don’t agree with their subjects expressly request that their name be left off.
Fees can range from about $50,000 to hundreds of thousands of dollars. There is even little agreement on what to call a ghostwriter; some strongly prefer the term “collaborator,” because they think “ghost” implies something shifty about the arrangement, or that the subject — generally, the “author” in contractual language — had nothing to do with the finished product.
Often a writer will meet the subject only a few times, then follow up with phone calls, emails and texts. Others say that in order to get enough of a sense of the person to capture on the page, they need at least a few dozen hours in the presence of a client.
To write Andre Agassi’s memoir, “Open,” Moehringer moved to Las Vegas, where Agassi lived. Agassi said he bought a house 1 mile away from his own, and Moehringer occupied it for two years while he worked on the book. All the writer requested was a long table where he could lay out the scenes he’d piece together “like a necklace,”
Agassi recalled. They’d meet in the morning, fueled by breakfast burritos from Whole Foods.
“Open” is widely considered a paragon of sports autobiographies — a raw and honest excavation of a well-known life. Agassi said he sought out Moehringer to write the book — “romancing” him to do it, he said — after reading Moehringer’s memoir “The Tender Bar,” about growing up with a single mother.
A former newspaper reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, Moehringer has a reputation for intense work habits — he rarely sleeps when finishing a book — along with a good sense of humor and strong opinions about the projects he works on, even if they ultimately belong to somebody else. Like any reliably employed ghostwriter, Moehringer is also known for his discretion.
Prince Harry’s book is his third ghostwriting project. Maybe.
“It’s quite hard to tell; it’s the third that I know of,” said Will Schwalbe, who was editor-in-chief at Hyperion when it published “The Tender Bar.”
Beyond doing the writing, a good ghostwriter also encourages subjects to go beyond what they might say on their own, a crucial challenge with public figures who have been famous for many years and whose life stories are already well known.
Agassi said that Moehringer asked hard questions to help him dig deeper but that he felt safe throughout the process; the honesty that resulted from their collaboration is part of what made the memoir so highly regarded.
“He’s half-psychiatrist,” Phil Knight, a founder of Nike, said of Moehringer, who collaborated on his memoir “Shoe Dog.” “He gets you to say things you really didn’t think you would.”