Ghosting by Jennie Erdal

The first book I started this year was one I bought for a treat in Woodstock’s independent bookshop – Ghosting (2004) by Jennie Erdal. I’ve been lucky enough to have quite a few review copies from Slightly Foxed, but hadn’t had this one – so it was a nice one to reward myself for… well, something last July. Who knows what.

All I knew about the memoir was that it was about ghostwriting, and that Slightly Foxed Editions pretty much never put a foot wrong. And Ghosting turns out to be no exception – what an extraordinary book.

Erdal was the ghostwriter for ‘Tiger’, a man who is not named in the book but who was apparently Naim Attallah. That name means nothing to me, but he is certainly a character and not in a particularly positive way. More on that later. And when I say that Erdal was a ghostwriter, it seems that she wrote more or less anything that Tiger needed to claim as his own – whether letters, newspaper columns, or full-length novels.

She got the job by having done some Russian translation – Tiger asked her to come on board at his publishing house, in charge of the Russian list. She doesn’t go into his backstory, so I don’t know how somebody as supremely unqualified as Tiger came to own a publishing house – but, dizzied, she does accept this role. She’s allowed to work from her home in Scotland, only occasionally coming down to London for meetings. When her role expands into writing up and editing interviews Tiger does with hundreds of women for a ‘book about women’, she finds that she has morphed into a ghostwriter.

I was ready to be fascinated by her account of ghostwriting and was a bit annoyed when she started talking about her upbringing. But, my goodness, she’s very good at it. Hers was a family where appearances mattered more than anything, and the abiding horrors of her parents were (a) shaming themselves before their neighbours and (b) Catholicism.

In our house it was usually easy to work out what was good and what was bad. Some things were regarded as good in themselves: for example, eating slowly, Formica, curly hair, secrecy, patterned carpets, straight legs, Scotch broth, bananas, going to the toilet before leaving the house, not crying whatever the circumstances – the goodness of these things was not open to challenge. Thus a child with curly hair who liked bananas and never cried was praised to the skies. By the same token, eating fast, straight hair, plain carpets and so on were bad things and, where possible, not allowed. If it was not possible to ban them, they were simply frowned upon. All this was clear-cut and easy to follow. However, in the way we spoke and the words we used, it was much harder to know good from bad, right from wrong. The rules seemed not to be fixed. Working out what was allowed, or when it might not be, was something of a leap in the dark.

Erdal doesn’t treat the memoir chronologically, covering childhood before moving onto adulthood, but rather draws links between her background and what’s going on with Tiger. It’s all done very elegantly and impressively – though in the second half of the memoir, it’s just about Tiger and working for him.

Tiger. Good grief. What an appalling man. Erdal is never vituperative, and seems to have been under the spell of his apparent charm – but beneath this, the reader can see what a monstrous man he is. Tiger is completely selfish, expecting everyone to bend to his will. He is devoted to ‘beautiful women’, but doesn’t seem particularly bothered about their minds or personalities, or even what they think of him in return. The portrait of Erdal working with him isn’t far off an abusive relationship, particularly when she starts to want to change the arrangement.

And yet she treats it lightly, and Ghosting is often funny. Tiger is as ridiculous as he is awful. And Erdal focuses on the ridiculous when she starts writing a novel ‘with’ him. He seems to believe he has come up with the idea of it – because he says it should involve a passionate affair. That’s it; that’s the plot. It’s left to Erdal to craft something from that premise – and her description of the editing process is funny, frustrating, and bizarre. What’s so impressive is that she doesn’t give up trying to do well, and she writes brilliantly in Ghosting about the process of trying to satisfy Tiger’s whims while also satisfying her artistic nature.

The fact that I was writing as someone else – with a mask on, as it were – inevitably added yet another layer of complexity. I did and did not feel responsible for the words on the page, I did and did not feel that they belonged to me; I did and did not feel that I could defend them in my heart.

Erdal writes so well about her inner philosophy – and, in the same volume, writing movingly about her childhood and her divorce, as well as drawing a portrait of the outlandish, absurd, and appalling Tiger. And she even finds pity for him.

Ghosting holds together many disparate elements brilliantly and it’s another success for the Slightly Foxed Editions series. A great start to the reading year.