‘Have just swum round hotel pool,’ my youngest daughter texted from Zante, where she was indulging in her first non-family holiday. ‘Saw four different people reading your books. So annoying that I can’t tell them my dad wrote them!’
Virtually everyone, from Mariella Frostrup, the Queen of Radio Book Shows, to the proverbial bloke in the pub, wants to know the same thing about the battered egos of ghostwriters. ‘Isn’t it frustrating to have a book at the top of the bestseller lists and for no one to know that you wrote it?’
‘I think it’s a matter of expectations,’ is my usual reply. ‘If I had written a book expecting it to be published in my own name and to bring me great glory, then I would be very disappointed – perhaps even bitter – if the publisher informed me at the last moment that it was going to go out under the name of a footballer or soap actor. But if I know that is what I have been hired to do from the start I am merely pleased to see that I have succeeded in achieving the brief I was given. If I had been Barack Obama’s speechwriter and a speech that I had written gained him a standing ovation and led to him being praised for his eloquence and getting into the White House I would not feel frustrated that he received the glory rather than me, I would simply be pleased that my speech had done the trick. It’s the same with books.’
There are, I believe, more positives to being invisible than negatives. While there are always moments when everyone fantasises about being feted and adored, nominated for prizes and fawned over on chat shows, there is also a great deal of comfort in not being someone who had hoped for such things, only to be disappointed. Once I finish a book I can move straight on to another one, immediately immersing myself in a completely new subject and not having to trail around obscure radio stations in the middle of the night to talk about something I wrote a year earlier, or obliged to turn up for bookshop signings only to find that no one is remotely interested. Earning a living as a writer opens you up to enough potential situations for rejection as it is without going out looking for more.
On the subject of Mariella Frostrup, sort of, I was being interviewed at home one day by an outside broadcast team for one of her various bookish television programmes. Asked why I so liked writing in the voices of people of different genders, nationalities and backgrounds to myself, I gave a pat answer which seemed to me like a clever sound bite.
‘I am white, male, middle aged, middle class, middle brow and English-speaking,’ I pontificated to camera. ‘I think the world has heard enough from people like me over the last few hundred years, don’t you? Perhaps it’s time to listen to a few other voices.’
I thought no more of it until the show was aired. I neither saw nor heard any danger signals as I admired the screen version of myself delivering my smart answer. The item ended and the programme returned to the studio, where Mariella was sitting with Peter James, a kind friend and enormously successful author, and Robert Harris, the man who had so generously quoted me in his ghostwriting thriller.
‘So, gentlemen,’ the mischievous Mariella began, ‘Andrew Crofts thinks we’ve heard enough from white, male, middle-aged, middle-class, middle-brow English-speaking authors … what do you say to that?’
I thought both the white, male, middle-aged, middle-class, middle-brow, English-speaking writers were extremely forgiving under the circumstances.