A client once brought me to a vineyard in California to attend a family reunion.
Except this was not a normal reunion. DNA evidence had revealed that my client’s father wasn’t her biological father, and that she had more family than they ever knew existed. So my client flew the new family in to meet the old one, all at once. A big surprise, the kind you would never dare put in fiction because no editor would believe it. And I was there when it happened for the reason I am ever anywhere: someone wanted the story written down, and they wanted me to be the one holding the pen.
This kind of work has been my job for a better part of a decade.
Put simply, I write books for rich people.
The fuller version: I’m a memoir ghostwriter. People hire me to live inside their memories for 8 to 12 months and come out the other side with a book that sounds so much like them that their own kids can’t tell where they end and I begin. Their name goes on the cover. My name goes on the invoice.
And before the headline gets me in trouble: not all of my clients are rich. Some are Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and NBA players, sure. Plenty are not wealthy at all. The thing every single one of them shares is that they put real value on the written word — enough to hire someone who has given her whole life to it.
📕Why Ghostwriting is Controversial
Publishing has a complicated relationship with my profession. Every time a famous memoir turns out to be ghostwritten, the internet performs its little ritual of shock. Is it real writing? Is it cheating? Shouldn’t an author write their own book?
Here’s my answer, a decade in: every book you have ever loved was co-created. The novel that rearranged your soul had an editor whose fingerprints are all over its pacing. It had an agent who redirected the premise, a copyeditor who saved the author from her own tics, and sometimes a book doctor no one will ever credit. Publishing runs on collaborative labor wearing a single name. The byline has always been a simplification.
Ghostwriting just says that part out loud, and prices the labor accordingly.
As for authenticity, the worry everyone reaches for first: I’d argue a good ghostwriter produces more of it, not less. Authenticity lives in the story, not in the typing. My entire job is pulling the truest version of a life out of a person (the version they’d tell you at midnight, not the version they perform at dinner parties) and then protecting it from cliché. When it works, readers meet the realest version of a human being that has ever existed on paper. It just happens to be typed by me.
I’ve written before about where ghostwriting sits in my income stack and what it pays, and the client-facing mechanics live on my blog: what a memoir ghostwriter actually does and my exact process.
Today is about everything that doesn’t fit on a services page: what this job is actually like from the inside, and how it handed me my new romantic thriller novel concept.
📧 What’s Behind the Paywall Today
Below the line, for paid subscribers:
The rooms this job has unlocked: lunch with clients in Singapore, a private tour of the Austrian countryside, workshop trips to the Southwest with executive coaches.
The interviews I can’t fully describe, including people caught up in actual government conspiracies.
What the intimacy of this work really feels like — the trenches, the camaraderie, and the moment a client stops being a client.
The $50,000 memoir job a newsletter editor swore was fake, and what that disbelief reveals about how writers price themselves.
The full origin story of Let Me Be Your Ghost: the what-if that started as a joke (a ghostwriter working undercover for the FBI) and the second what-if that turned it into a love story.
Why I set the book in San Francisco years before I even lived here.
If you’ve been reading free for a while, this is the kind of essay the paid tier exists for. Paid subscribers are also getting every new chapter of Let Me Be Your Ghost as it drops.
