Ghostwriters

The commercial memoir “Spare” (2023) was written by Prince Harry, or so its jacket cover pronounces. Or was it? Not entirely, as is often so with celebrity memoirs. There is a ghostwriter named J.R. Moehringer, who removes all guesswork about the joint effort in the writing process in his own piece, “The Ghostwriter,” in The New Yorker (May 5, 2023). Maybe the piece is even more interesting to read than the book itself. I do not know, because I have not read the book, but the magazine article is quite revealing about how ghostwriting works. And, for me, a part-time grant writer for others in the Library world, I found some parallels. Before reading Moehringer, I had the idea that ghostwriters were just tools of the celebrity author, someone to take to the keyboard what the celebrity …