being a ghost

There are different kinds of writers. Ada Calhoun is one I’m not, that is, she’s a professional. She writes in order to pay the bills, so she writes to order. She is able to write to please people who will cut her a check. In her new memoir about failing to write a Frank O’Hara biography Calhoun describes some of her projects:

A few years ago, I got a call from my agent telling me that a celebrity needed someone to redo the twenty thousand words the first ghostwriter had done and then to finish the hundred-thousand-word manuscript in five weeks. The book came out and hit the New York Times bestseller list.

A couple of years after that, I sensed that a memoir on which I was the ghost might be in jeopardy. The celebrity was making sounds about the pages not sounding quite right, a red flag. I asked for a sample of writing that worked. Then I spent hours mapping the grammar of that sample, line by line, onto each story I’d been told. That book came out on time, and it, too, hit the New York Times bestseller list.

I wouldn’t be able to do this. I could probably mimic a preferred style for a page or two. Even then it would be torture. I remember back in the 90s when I was going to UC Berkeley, Fodor’s created a new travel guides imprint to compete with Lonely Planet. The Berkeley Guides were going to be hip and happening, man, and Fodor’s was going to take advantage of Berkeley’s rep for being counterculture, which Fodor’s definitely wasn’t. Fodor’s set up shop on or near campus — and began advertising for writers and editors. I took out an application, pored over it, and ultimately realized it was not for me, neither as editor nor as writer. I just can’t crank out copy. I can write, but I can’t write like that.

source: 

Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, my father, and me

Ada Calhoun

2022. Grove Press, New York NY