Ghosting is a remarkable account of one woman's life - or to be more accurate, lives.
For fifteen years, Jennie Erdal had a double existence: officially she worked as a personal editor for one particular man - Tiger - but in reality she was his ghost-writer and in some mysterious sense his alter ego. During this time she wrote a great deal that appeared under his name - from personal letters and business correspondence to newspaper columns, novels and full length books.
Ghosting moves from a vivid evocation of an austere upbringing in Fife to superbly rendered portraits of the people with whom Jennie Erdal worked at a London-based publishing house, chief among them Tiger, the larger-than-life character with whom the author had a unique and symbiotic relationship; professionally hidden, yet somehow truthful and intimate. This moving and beautifully written memoir is laced throughout with rich, quiet comedy and profound insights into what it means to be human and to live in language.
Ghosting is a meditation on words, identity and creativity, but above all it is a portrait of a uniquely intimate relationship between a man and a woman.
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So strange and exotic is he that he could be a rare tropical birds that you might never come face to face with, even in a lifetime spent in the rainforest. PART 1, A MEETING
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(@canongatebooks, 31 August 2010, ebook, 290 pages, borrowed from @GlasgowLib via @OverDriveInc, # POPSUGARReadingChallenge, a book about someone leading a double life)
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I thought Ghosting was a remarkable book. Jennie's experiences with Tiger are not what I expected ghost writing to be and I'm sure they are not the usual conventions. She is not merely Tiger's editor or ghost writer; she writes as him with very vague input from him and gets no real credit apart from his gushing praise. I can't help wonder who Tiger really is. I found Jennie's experiences fascinating.
