Living like a modern-day Cyrano

The first words we encounter in Jennie Erdal’s absorbing memoir, “Ghosting,” are those of a tender love letter written by a rather erudite man to his wife. Only, as Erdal next informs us, the words weren’t written by the man but for him by Erdal herself.

“The letters mattered greatly to the man who put his name to them,” she adds, “for they often expressed what he was not capable of articulating on his own.... He savoured each sentence, pausing over every nuance, weighing up the effect of this or that word.”

Erdal thus begins her account of becoming a ghostwriter with a self-portrait reminiscent of Cyrano de Bergerac, for hers is, in part, a story in which a clever, literate person is seduced into helping a more glamorous but less articulate one express himself. In the nearly two decades in which she worked with the colorful British publisher of Quartet Books, Erdal says she ghostwrote newspaper articles, speeches and several books, all of which appeared under his name: “We worked well together, and on the whole I was a willing partner, interested in the job and fascinated by the psychological processes involved on both sides. Over the years I learned a great deal about vanity, the desire to belong, the lengths a man will go to in affecting to be something other than he is. And the lengths a woman will go to in colluding with the pretence.”

Transporting us back to 1981 and her first meeting with the Middle Eastern-born British publishing sensation Naim Attallah, to whom she refers in this memoir as “Tiger” but whose name is found in the notes, Erdal also likens him to a rare tropical bird, brilliantly plumed and bejeweled, charming, impulsive and slightly primitive: “His body is never still but moves to the rhythm and cadences of his speech pattern. He does a low salaam and beckons me to follow, like a Bedouin prince inviting an honored guest to his tent.”

The traditional, risible British susceptibility to the lure of the supposedly romantic “Orient” seems in play here, and for a moment, we almost feel as if we’re in an updated version of “The Sheik.” “Ghosting,” however, is not a tale of sexual seduction, not in any conventional sense. It is, instead, a portrait of a curiously intimate professional relationship that proved both symbiotic and parasitic.

The product of a somewhat grim Scottish Presbyterian upbringing, Erdal discovered she had a flair for foreign languages and literatures. It was her knowledge of Russian that first brought her into contact with “Tiger,” who offered her a position managing his Russian list. It was the perfect job for a young wife and mother of three, enabling her to work at home in Scotland. When Erdal’s husband stunned her by walking out on their marriage in 1985, her warmhearted boss floated her a loan and came up with a writing project to benefit them both.

Ghostwriting nonfiction, Erdal found, was not too difficult. But when “Tiger” decided it was time to make his debut as a novelist, it was a different matter entirely: “I tried to think myself into what I imagined Tiger’s style might be, but the more I searched for his voice, the more I caught my own breaking through; the more I tried to realise his literary aspirations, the more my own seemed to intrude. The novel did not grow organically; it was force-fed and boosted with steroids.”

With admirable economy, grace and humor, Erdal conveys how difficult and deeply unsatisfying it can be to write without sincerity, without that sense of compulsion that comes from within. In deftly comic scenes, she contrasts Tiger’s amusingly simplistic notions about writing with her own. Engaging though he was, however, Erdal also came to see through his apparent naivete: “Tiger, while affecting a boyish ingenuousness, was actually endowed with a Machiavellian shrewdness.... At times it seemed ungenerous not to succumb to his childlike excitement, which came over as a kind of innocent hopefulness endlessly generated and regenerated. However, I knew it was driven by something not at all innocent.”

Although Tiger is in some ways the book’s most memorable character, Erdal refrains from giving us details of his background. What Erdal has written is not an expose of the publishing world but a self-analytical account of her experience in it. Erdal is a gifted writer, and this memoir reveals the impressive range of her skills. Along with thoughtful and illuminating reflections on language, writing and the emotional costs of lying, “Ghostwriting” is filled with poignantly hilarious scenes in which Erdal and her boss, attempting to pursue a common goal from utterly divergent sensibilities, try to reach a meeting of the minds. Whether she is mining this rich vein of social comedy or delving into her own background in the classic mode of autobiographer, her writing displays a sincerity that compels attention and a nicely ironic perceptiveness that enhances the pleasure of reading her.

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Merle Rubin is a contributing writer to Book Review.