When I first became a ghost, I got a kick out of telling people what I did for a living. But as time wore on, particularly if I found myself in the company of someone who was engaged in what I considered serious work such as foreign correspondence or humanitarian aid, I felt embarrassment admitting how I paid my bills. In their eyes, I imagined, or sometimes sensed, I was a hack. I justified to myself that most of the books I worked on dealt with important topics and that my subjects had many lessons to teach me, either directly or indirectly, and that this ghostwriting business was my own personal tutorial in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
Besides learning a lot about the book business, I also learned a lot about Washington—some of it positive but much of it negative. It is a town built on secrets, a place where having the capacity for deception is a marketable skill. It is also a town that people flock to in order to make a name for themselves, but sometimes they lose their identity in the process. That’s what happened to me.
In “Washington Confidential,” a hybrid literature/journalism class I taught with my colleague and friend Maureen Corrigan, we embarked on a literary quest with our students to find the text that most authentically defined “the Washington story.” It proved to be elusive, and by the end of the semester we had yet to settle on our choice. Why was this so difficult? One of our brilliant students, Caitlin Ouano, made this observation in her final paper:
Susan Brownmiller, an American feminist and journalist, wrote in her 1984 book Femininity that “women are all female impersonators to some degree.” The question of authenticity has been raised in reading Washington literature, and perhaps the question can be framed in Ms. Brownmiller’s terms: aren’t Washingtonians all Washingtonian impersonators to some degree? Drawing this connection in the search not simply for authenticity but rather identity in the Washington story, a person who can possibly convey the experience of this search is a woman: the born impersonator, the individual constantly in search for an authentic image of self in a world where she is bombarded by multiple representations of her gender that are both like and unlike her authentic identity and individuality.
As the class tried to determine why it was so hard to maintain an authentic self in Washington, and therefore tough to create an authentic literary representation, we kept coming back to the cliché of Washington as a swamp. If you google “Washington built on a swamp,” you will get all sorts of stories and references debunking the myth, noting that only 1 to 2 percent of the actual topography of the federal city is technically swampland.
In this Google search you will also get helpful disquisitions distinguishing “marshy low ground” from “tidal estuary” from “mudflats.” And finally, among all this talk about why Washington isn’t really a swamp, you will find quote after quote noting that the swamp motif is just too good a metaphor to abandon for the sake of geographical accuracy. That’s because we’re speaking about the intersection of politics, government, and media, and there is no better metaphor to evoke the stench, muck, and impenetrability of a culture that swallows up one’s true identity and, often, truth itself. Sometimes we get pulled in, other times we walk in of our own volition.
At the center of my own personal swamp was an African proverb I stumbled onto long ago. It became a constant reminder of a bad time in my life and just the word village could send me into a funk. For many years I couldn’t see my way out. But life is funny like that—as it turns out, another African proverb served as the inspiration to finally pull myself up out of the muck and write my own book.
“Until the lion has a historian,” goes the adage, “the hunter will always be the hero.”