After all . . . what is the past but what we choose to remember?
—Amy Tan, The Bonesetter’s Daughter
Writing other people’s lives is a bit silly, like playing dress-up, clomping around in your mother’s pumps that don’t quite fit, but it also lets you have a momentary sense of what it’s like to be someone else. That’s what I told myself I was doing: rehearsing for my real life. But meanwhile, inhabiting the minds and lives of other people for a decade had afforded me a comfortable lifestyle: I could rent a nice place in one of the most expensive cities in the world; I didn’t have any debt and I could take vacations and still save for the future. The money had been a great excuse to put off being fully present in my own interior life, which for a writer pretty much is your life.
By this time I had reached my midthirties, and I had to face the fact that this had become my real life, whether or not I had gotten here accidentally rather than purposefully. I could no longer hide under the guise of ingénue or mentee. My youth and its promise had long since exceeded their expiration date. Time to grow up. We all define “growing up” a little differently. But before I could make room for myself and my own memories, I had to exorcise the ghosts of others. Growing up also meant getting married and having kids, two things that had eluded me. Washington is not an easy town for relationships. People work long hours and put their jobs first, and I had been guilty of both.
Though my book business kept me plenty busy, it was mainly a solitary endeavor, and I appreciated the human interaction that part-time teaching provided. By 1996, I had been teaching Introduction to Journalism at Georgetown University for four years, every Monday evening on the second floor of White-Gravenor, a decaying Gothic building. My classroom was below some sort of science lab that periodically oozed an unknown liquid through its floor onto my classroom’s ceiling.
Because I taught in the evenings, I had minimal interaction with the regular full-time faculty in the English Department, but that fall semester after working with Morry, I did meet and get to know a colleague, an eighteenth-century-literature scholar, Dennis Todd, whose classes were scheduled during the daytime. One day Dennis mistakenly got a piece of mail advertising a journalism event. He brought it to me and we began talking. That led to a drink down by the Potomac that turned into dinner at an Italian restaurant across town.
Then, unexpectedly, he offered to wash my car. I realize that sounds vaguely obscene, but it was nothing more than a kind gesture when he noticed my car was splattered with mud. The car washing won my heart, and that led to him inviting me to stay for enchiladas, and the Mexican food stole my stomach. Twenty years later, he’s still making me enchiladas (the car washing, not so much). We moved in together, married, and had a daughter just fourteen months after meeting.
I love being married and having a family and sometimes wonder what took me so long to settle down. Was it something about me? Or was it something about Washington? Why was it so hard to make a connection in a city whose currency is connections?
This is something that bothered me for quite a while: Before I met my husband, while I was working with Mrs. Clinton on her book, I began to despair that I was spending my days (and nights) involved in, entrenched even, in others’ lives both professionally (ghosting memoirs and manifestos) and personally (I loved children and since I didn’t have my own, I found ways to have them in my life: I volunteered at Children’s Hospital; took care of friends’ children; taught children how to ice-skate; and, most importantly, devoted myself to my niece and nephews).
But these surrogates weren’t enough, so I found a shrink, signed on for weekly appointments, and committed to jump-starting my personal life. The irony of paying someone to listen to me narrate my own story was not lost on me. And the therapist, being a creature of Washington, seemed fascinated by the stories I told because—let’s face it—there were good characters in these stories, even if I knew they weren’t my stories. Listen to the one about Bob Woodward! Hillary Clinton! The senator who committed an indiscretion! The war hero who ran for president! Everyone else’s story was easier to tell than my own. If I kept this up, I could spend forever without ever having to face my own demons.
After several months, I began to run out of material and decided that these sessions weren’t helping, and so I pulled the plug. End of that story? Nope. Not in this town. Flash forward two years, and I’m married with an infant. I get a letter from the shrink, addressed to me at Georgetown’s English Department, something to the effect of “I can’t find you. Your phone number has changed. Could you please get in touch with me?” I speculated it must be something about the final bill. But why did she wait this long to contact me? Nervously, I dialed her number.
I should have guessed what she wanted. She wanted to write a book, and she wanted to hire me to help her. The violation of boundaries in this proposition was stunning and immediately obvious, at least to me. But this was Washington. A city with no borders: The personal is the professional, the private the public, and vice versa.
So why didn’t I tell her no or even point out the ethical implications of working with someone who could catalog my secrets, phobias, and failures like they were butterflies? I dunno. Maybe I need a different shrink to answer that. Maybe it’s as simple as I needed a gig, and she offered me one.
I was on hiatus from another book project, a sinking ship of a manuscript by a senator who shall remain nameless. Suffice it to say he had a female problem, though I know that doesn’t really narrow things down much, does it? His wife didn’t approve of his book project, and she seemed to resent my presence in their home. The files and I were exiled to the basement of the basement, which felt like taking a day hike through Stalin’s gulag. This basement banishment seemed to underscore a shame that went along with this profession. Ghosts were to be spirited away, ignored, treated with disdain. A magazine piece I had read years before about celebrity memoirs quoted a book editor as noting that ghostwriters were “basically typists.” That one had stung.
I secretly agreed with the senator’s wife that the project was a bad idea. They had worked through their problems, or maybe around them; in any event, they seemed to be in a good place. So why revisit an unfortunate past? I believe he was compelled by an overarching sense that he was misunderstood and that his transgression had been exaggerated by the media and that it unfairly eclipsed a lifetime of public service.
At one point, I found myself standing outside their senatorial house in the August heat—when I was seven months pregnant, round and squat as a pumpkin, and sweating like a Sumo wrestler—listening to the wife threaten me that if this book had anything in it to hurt her husband, she would . . . I kept silent though I wanted to note that her husband’s secrets were safe with me. After my Woodward experience, I was now the Fort Knox of collaborators.
As the months went by it became clear that the senator was destined not to finish his memoir, and that was just as well. I now had a baby to care for and had taken the semester off from teaching. So when the shrink with no boundaries came along, I was in need of a new gig. She would compensate me well. I told myself it would be a temporary and convenient solution.
Except it didn’t feel temporary, and it was anything but convenient.
Almost immediately, she started calling several times a day, starting as early as 7:00 a.m. Her reliance on me quickly became suffocating. She knew I wasn’t working on anything else, but I had told her that that could change. She expressed concern about whether I would continue to have enough time to work with her but quickly added she didn’t resent the time that my daughter required. It struck me as an odd thing to say.
One day she brought over a gift for my daughter that one of her patients had made. It was a clown doll, its torso and limbs pieces of Styrofoam covered in cloth; its nose, eyes, and mouth were plastic buttons attached with straight pins. Talk about a choking hazard. Even worse, it had that creepy horror movie clown thing going on.
Dennis took one look and said, “This is getting really weird.” Then he picked it up and, holding it at arm’s length, took it out to the trash. After that, I gently began to push back against her ever-encroaching insertion into my life, but she pushed back even harder. Psychologically, of course, she had the advantage. As her patient I had shared with her my demons and my weaknesses—relevant here, my people-pleasing tendencies. The situation felt claustrophobic. And then, as happens too rarely in life, opportunity knocked on our door.
One evening, Dennis came home with a letter on official Georgetown University stationery. “We are pleased to inform you that you have been selected to be the professor-in-residence for the academic year 1999–2000,” it said.
The chaos of our first year of parenthood had caused us to forget that Dennis had applied for the Villa program in Italy. I had studied Italian in college and lived there for the summer after graduating from Berkeley. My 1995 post-Village trip had renewed my determination to return someday and stay for a long time. This sojourn wasn’t decided on a whim but rather was the end point of a slow-burning and ever-mounting desire that we shared to live in Italy and that I had to escape from Washington. And now we were going to do just that. Nine glorious months in Italy.
Like Henry Adams’s Democracy character Madeleine Lightfoot Lee, who said she dreamed of running off to Egypt, I, too, was disillusioned with Washington. “Democracy has shaken my nerves to pieces,” Adams’s character proclaimed. “Oh, what rest it would be to live in the Great Pyramid and look out for ever at the polar star!”
The Georgetown compound wasn’t just any villa; a Rockefeller had bequeathed it to Georgetown University. It was blissfully located in Fiesole, an ancient hill town that sits just above Florence: Villa Le Balze. Le Balze means “The Cliffs.” Let that roll off your tongue and automatically the shoulders relax and exhaling becomes a natural and involuntary activity, something you no longer need to remind yourself to do.
Dolce far niente. Sweet to do nothing. Sweet to get the hell out of Washington.
We gave our landlord notice, put our belongings in a storage unit, stowed our car in Ben Bradlee’s country home barn, and fled to Italy with our twenty-month-old daughter.
After a long flight, then a car ride through Florence and up a long, winding one-lane road to the town of Fiesole, we arrived at the Villa Le Balze. We were shown to the villino (little villa), a two-story apartment in a separate building across a garden from the main villa. From nearly any vantage point on the grounds, there was a truly breathtaking vista of Florence below, overlooking the river Arno. And just a short but heart-stopping walk up to the top of the hill stood Fiesole, a village with Etruscan ruins, a Roman amphitheater and temple, an eleventh-century cathedral, and numerous structures dating to the Renaissance.
The villa grounds included an internationally recognized maze of gardens and an active olive grove from which came the best olive oil I’ve ever tasted. Two amazing cooks were on duty to make lunch and dinner for the students and faculty, as well as housekeepers and gardeners to keep everything tidy and beautiful. The villa had survived being bombed during World War II, and it was still elegant with its high ceilings and big windows with panoramic views. The library had a piano and spectacular old bookshelves. It was the perfect place to sip a glass of red wine and curl up with E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View.
We didn’t know much about how Georgetown had ended up with the villa. We had heard through the university grapevine that a Rockefeller had left it to Georgetown so she wouldn’t have to leave it to her children. The truth, as it so often does, turned out to be more complicated. According to Dominick Dunne, in a splashy Vanity Fair piece, the fabulously wealthy granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller, Margaret Rockefeller Strong, at age seventy-seven married her second husband, Raymundo de Larrain, who, thirty-three years her junior, convinced her to rewrite her will and leave her assets to him rather than her two children from her first marriage. A lawsuit ensued. The New York Times reported that the children’s lawyer “argued that Mr. de Larrain had deliberately isolated their mother from her servants and from the Rockefeller family, then manipulated her into changing her will. In her final will, signed in Florida, the children were disinherited.”
But at age eighty-two, Margaret had signed away the villa to the university in 1979, a year before she rewrote her will, and six years before her death. Did her husband convince her to do that? Did Georgetown? The truth was more complicated than the rumors we had heard. Her obituary notes that during the spring before the winter she died, she and her husband were awarded honorary degrees from Georgetown for their work on behalf of “culture, peace and world harmony” (the lack of familial harmony notwithstanding, apparently). Why she turned over the villa to Georgetown and not her children or her husband may be unknowable.
Uncontestable was how spectacular the gardens were. Her father, Charles Augustus Strong, a philosopher and author, had retreated there after his wife, the daughter of John D. Rockefeller, died. Though he owned the land, there was no existing home.
But Fiesole was a lovely, peaceful place for a widowed father of a nine-year-old girl to set down roots, so he hired two well-known English architects to design and build the villa. Here, Margaret could play among the olive groves and garden statues, and Charles could host other philosophers, among them his old friend and Harvard classmate George Santayana. It was a setting that appealed to young and old, to anyone who appreciated beauty and tranquility.
Just below Le Balze, to the east, literally across the road, was the Villa Medici, considered to be the first true Renaissance villa, which in 1458 had been the summer retreat of Cosimo the Elder and was now where the Argentine soccer star Gabriel Batistuta lived. To the north is the Villa San Girolamo, the setting for Michael Ondaatje’s bestselling novel The English Patient.
Though we are not related to the Rockefellers or anyone else remotely rich or fancy, we were treated like royalty from the moment we arrived. My husband was addressed by one and all as Professore, and I was Signora. Our daughter, walking but barely talking, was called a variety of endearments including carina, bambina, bella.
Sasha had been an easy baby and she was an easy toddler. She slept through the night, took naps (the entire country took naps!), rarely fell ill, and had a happy, sunny disposition. In equal measure, she loved pasta and the attention of our students; there were about two dozen of them living at the villa for the semester. And for peer companionship, Sasha made friends with one of the cooks’ small children, whose farm we regularly visited for playdates. I would marvel at my good fortune as I wended my way through Tuscan hills illuminated by the Italian sun, and I didn’t miss driving through suburban Washington among its cranky commuters.
We quickly settled into a routine, with Dennis focused on teaching while I cared for Sasha. For the first time in eighteen years, I had time on my hands. I wasn’t expected to teach. I didn’t have a publisher breathing down my neck. I was there, gratefully, in the role of faculty spouse, with no other obligations than to mind our daughter. I could write, drink wine, and reflect on my life. Or just drink wine. I didn’t feel like writing. I was having too much fun. We felt so incredibly welcomed in Italy. Wherever we went, people fawned over Sasha. Bakers, maître d’s, shopkeepers, merry-go-round operators—everyone had at least a smile and usually a dolce for her.
More than anyone else, the Italian director of the program, Marcelo, and his wife, Cinzia, made us feel at home. Their daughter was exactly the same age as Sasha and, though they didn’t share a language, they did share their toys, which is all that matters when you’re two years old. And so it was to Marcelo we turned when we learned that for every Christmas holiday, the university muckety-mucks (wealthy alums and donors) took over the villino, and we would have to temporarily vacate the premises for three weeks.
Marcelo suggested we spend the first week, leading up to and including Christmas day, in Orvieto, a town in the region of Umbria. He arranged for us to borrow the villa’s vehicle, and we drove there, first staying at a nunnery that took in boarders to help with the bills. The village was a magical place, particularly at this time of year, all lit up with holiday lights, fresh snow blanketing the cobblestone streets, and the smell of warm bread wafting out of the many bakeries as we strolled around, stopping for coffee, sweets, and vino whenever the spirit moved us.
Most of that week, I was able to live only in the moment, a state of being that usually eludes me. But when I did think of our future, it was about the house we would buy and the home we would make when our Italian days came to their conclusion. Though I wasn’t eager to return to Washington, I was excited to think about putting down roots. Before getting married, I had moved almost every two years, leading the typical young, single person’s nomadic life. Moving so frequently had lost its appeal, and I looked forward to staying put in one place. It was in Orvieto that I found a brass door knocker for the house that Sasha would grow up in and leave from for college. I decided that one of Dennis’s first household chores in our future home would be to affix that knocker to the front door so that each time we entered the house we would remember our time in Italy.
Marcelo had suggested that after Umbria we travel to Tuscany, where his parents were caretakers on a farm. He said there was a converted barn for guests where we could write and make nice dinners amid the rolling hills. It sounded heavenly, and we readily agreed. So after Christmas, as the rest of the world braced for Y2K, we made our way from Umbria to Tuscany, following Marcelo’s handwritten directions along a dirt road to where Marcelo’s parents eagerly awaited us.
If the prognosticators were right and the modern world really did come to a standstill at Y2K, we wouldn’t even notice as we were surrounded by vineyards and olive groves. The world could sort out its technological issues while we drank the local Chianti and hunted for black truffles.
The first night we ate dinner at Marcelo’s parents’ table, my bad Italian serving as the only means of communication between our hosts and us. The second day Marcelo’s mother brought us an armful of leeks and taught Dennis, through pantomime, how to make leek risotto, a recipe he has made countless times over the last sixteen years for friends and family. The third day I asked for directions to the local butcher because I wanted to buy a chicken (mainly because it’s one of the few things I could remember how to say: Per favore, vorrei comprare un pollo.)
Instead of directions, Marcelo’s mother briefly disappeared and then presented us with a chicken she had just slaughtered, just for us. I’ll leave out the details here. It tasted great but nearly rendered me a vegetarian.
It was here, without the Internet or a television or even a radio, that I was finally alone with my thoughts. I would look out the window of our rustic cottage, an old barn converted for the modern comforts that tourists expected, and see nothing but vineyards for miles and miles. Dennis would take Sasha out to give me some space, accompanying Marcelo’s father as he hunted boar (okay, just pretending with a two-year-old along) or observed a herd of goats in the road and had a tour of the vineyards and learned about harvesting grapes. Dennis speaks no Italian, and Marcelo’s father no English so, again, pantomime was the primary mode of communication.
One morning, coffee cup in hand, I sat at the desk in front of the window, gazing at the rows of grapevines. It felt like something was waiting to be written. I didn’t know what. Out poured a several-thousand-word piece on ghostwriting in which I reflected on it as both a craft and a commercial endeavor. It also took shape as a declaration to give up the ghost. But first I had to explore why I had stuck with it for so many years.
If it was a detour, why hadn’t I renavigated by now? What was the appeal of ghostwriting? I asked myself. Why had I been drawn to it, or at least not recoiled from it when I fell into it accidentally? It was alluring because it allowed me into worlds I wouldn’t gain entry to otherwise. But that access did not give me the license to use what I observed, unlike a reporter’s ability to use most of the material he or she gathers. So the trouble I was having was reconciling the tension between access and authority.
Also the proximity to power was fun. Being needed by someone who has a story the world wants to hear can be irresistible. But with that proximity comes dependency, sometimes in the form of codependency. Take for example one of my favorite ghostwriter stories of all time, that of baseball great Ty Cobb, who employed a journalist named Al Stump to write his autobiography. Things went bad quickly, mainly because Cobb was reportedly a miserable human being who made everyone in his orbit miserable. According to author Ben Yagoda, “Stump quit the project twice and was fired once. But he always came back. He was living out a ghostwriter’s weird version of Stockholm syndrome.”
Stockholm syndrome! Brilliant. It sounds hyperbolic, but any writer who has spent a lot of time with her subject can relate. Whether the subject is someone you’ve met or a fictional or historical character, research breeds a psychological intimacy. I can understand how it happens. The techniques of ghostwriting or character development foster sympathy that inevitably grows into empathy. To evoke characters—whether they are fictional or real—you first have to understand them before you share them. What are their motivations? Can you, the writer, find something in your own interior life that helps you empathize with your character’s inner life?
No trait is more important for a ghost than empathy, something that is typically encouraged more in girls than in boys. As a ghost I had to convince myself that I was, for a time, another person. There were tangible things I did to achieve this: study the rhythm and cadence of the other’s speech patterns and vocabulary preferences, writing style, politics, sensibilities, and philosophies. I looked at family photo albums, reviewed footage of TV appearances and other available material.
One of the things that helped me most in constructing a voice was employing my version of the Stanislavski method, a “grammar of acting,” which instructs an actor through a series of techniques involving the concept of emotional memory, the internal triggering of emotions to become one with a character. Whether you’re up on a stage or in front of a keyboard, you connect with your own memories to express someone else’s feelings. I may not have cheated on my wife, but I can dig into the reservoir of crappy things I’ve done and come up with something to feel bad about.
I may not know what it’s like to live in the shadow of a famous relative, but I have certainly felt jealousy about others who are more talented and successful. And a funny thing happens when you not only walk in someone else’s shoes but also actually take up residence in their past: you blur the line between their lives and yours. Not in any sort of real or psycho way, but in a more deeply personal interior way.
Besides trying to get inside someone else’s skin emotionally, I also needed to sound like my subject, or at least sound the way I think others would expect the person to sound. This takes what Vassar professor Donald Foster calls “literary forensics.” If Foster’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he was plucked from Ivy Tower obscurity when a novel called Primary Colors, based on Bill Clinton’s first presidential primary, identified its author as “anonymous,” setting off a flurry of speculation as to who really wrote the roman à clef. Finally, New York magazine cracked the case when they consulted with Professor Foster, an expert in authenticating Shakespeare manuscripts. He ran Primary Colors through his computer software, studying all sorts of language markers such as sentence and paragraph length, vocabulary and punctuation patterns. Voilà! He determined that Joe Klein was the author.
The FBI then got the idea to use Foster for cases involving the written word such as the Unabomber’s manifesto and the JonBenét Ramsey kidnapping ransom note. Foster’s batting average turned out to be mixed but, for my purposes, there were techniques to be appropriated for my own work. Does your subject have favorite words? Phrases? Anecdotes? Themes? Does she speak and think in fully formed perfect paragraphs or does she interrupt herself a lot, digress? Does he use humor? Is he someone who pays attention to the details of language? Would he know how to properly use a semicolon? Is his style more folksy or wonky? If you’re using old speeches to refashion into autobiography, how does the language need to be massaged to work for the eye rather than the ear?
Joe Queenan wrote a hilarious New York Times essay on ghostwriting gone wrong and noted what happens when you hew a bit too closely to your subject’s oratory: “Hillary Rodham Clinton put her name on a vast, unprecedentedly uninteresting autobiography, waiting until page 529 before disclosing that her speechwriter was responsible for many of the words in the book, which, coincidentally, read like the world’s longest speech.”
Sometimes it’s not just typing, though you couldn’t tell that from the mail I get, often from people who want to become ghosts themselves: “I’m unpublished, uneducated, and inexperienced in the field . . . the idea of ghostwriting appealed to me . . . HOW does one become a ghostwriter? I can’t imagine I could put out an ad for politicians in hot water or aging Olympians.”
I also get a lot of inquiries from strangers who want me to write their books on spec, meaning no money up front, but they are sure they have a bestseller on their hands and that the story will practically tell itself. These include associates of “celebrities” who want to tell the truth about Hollywood or Wall Street or an elite enclave, claiming that their story, if shared with the public, will blow the lid open on “wealthy industrialists” and “high-priced ruthless attorneys” and even “save lives.”
Sometimes it’s their own life they want to save, writing from a correctional facility. One such letter was from a convicted bank robber with multiple personalities. No thanks, I thought, it’s hard enough capturing one voice. Another from a misunderstood embezzler. Then there are those who appealed to my ego, one writer claiming that because I had been “denounced,” my “boldness” prompted her to want me as a collaborator.
And, finally, I get a lot of inquiries from journalists writing about my experiences with Hillary Clinton: one noting “lots of inconsistent reporting about it floating around,” another asking about the role of ego in the process: “Does it ever creep up, when the praise is coming in and people are talking about the book you wrote but are not credited for publicly, do you ever mutter darkly into your whiskey ‘you jerks don’t even know’?”
As vexing as I ultimately found the whole business of midwifing others’ books, it gave me the opportunity to go places emotionally that I never would have gone on my own. The fiction writer, the ghostwriter, and the thespian all get to test-drive personas in the safety of the creative process. Looking back, it unsettles me how seamlessly I took on the role of an emotional chameleon. I want to believe that the gravitational pull between me and ghosting was empathy, but it was more likely a defense mechanism. It was much less of a risk to work on other people’s books—or so I thought—than to pursue my own projects. This work was a safe haven from my own fear of failure. I didn’t articulate this to myself then, but I must have intuited it deep within.
We returned to the villa in January and stayed there into the blissful spring, friends and family visiting us and accompanying us on weekend trips to Tuscan wineries and seaside villages. Another six months passed before we returned to Washington and another year before I tried to find a home for the article I wrote. I was ambivalent about lifting the veil (or the sheet; these ghost allusions are tedious but nearly automatic by now).
Finally, I submitted it to the Association of Writing Programs’ magazine, the Writer’s Chronicle, a well-regarded literary and academic publication that was not on the radar of the Washington press. It was exactly the sort of low-key venue I was comfortable with. I still didn’t want to be noticed, but so much had been written about me without my input that I wanted to document a few basic facts about my work as a ghost.
I had hoped this personal essay would put an end to this for me.
Wishful thinking.