A ghostwriter speaks
Did you read that essay by Prince Harry's ghostwriter? It's sitting in your stack of unread New Yorkers.
Do you have that same problem that I do—where you love The New Yorker but you have a life? Do you have a teetering stack of them you always mean to get around to?
I have two of those teetering stacks in my apartment, and occasionally, when I want a certain kind of happiness I can’t find elsewhere, I will pull an issue off that glossy stack, sit down, and make five hours disappear. The complex happiness that magazine creates in me isn’t on tap anywhere else.
Even their house style1 is a joy. I love watching their copyeditors fly their freak flag. One day I’m going to write a short story about a newly reëlected, highly coöperative skiïng coördinator reënegerizing the reëstablishment of coöccurring reëvalulations and submit it to The New Yorker.
These days, alas, I hardly pick up the print magazine. I still subscribe to it, and devotedly stack the latest issues on the teetering stacks, but whenever I find myself actually reading The New Yorker, it’s with the blue light of my iPhone in my face.
Not long ago, I had dinner with my longtime friend and former boss Dan Savage, and he was asking if I still loved The New Yorker, and we talked about how reading it in print is so much better than reading it on our phones, but somehow we can barely find time to read it in print anymore.
“I went to the park with a New Yorker but I couldn’t stop looking at my phone,” he said.
I do that too. I try to sit down with the print issue, but my phone is always calling to me in the corner of my mind. I’m trained on that dopamine hit now, not the slower, deeper pleasures of turning the pages of a magazine and seeing things—things you didn’t set out specifically to read, things you didn’t click on, but that delight you.
The other day I had a three-hour bus ride, from Seattle to Portland, so I brought a handful of New Yorkers off the top of my teetering stacks.
And, crucially, as I boarded the bus, I turned my phone off. With nothing else to do, I opened this particular issue of the magazine, I flipped through it cover-to-cover chuckling at each of the cartoons, and then I read a Personal History essay.
And it knocked my socks off.
Titled “The Ghostwriter” in print, it’s called “Notes from Prince Harry’s Ghostwriter” on the website.
The illustration is of Prince Harry, and the first sentence is “I was exasperated with Prince Harry,” but the heart of the piece has little to do with Prince Harry. Don’t skip it just because you’re sick of reading about Prince Harry.
The real story, the deeper story, the essay tells is the story of how Prince Harry’s ghostwriter came to ghostwriting. What in his background led him to want to speak through other people. The virtues and pleasures of disappearing in that particular way. The paradox of wanting to tell the story and wanting to hide at the same time.
I don’t want to give too much away, but if you have any interest in how writing works, how long-form journalism is changing, how hard it is to tell one’s story, how failure operates on a creative person’s mind, how sensitive people navigate a world of death and greed and snark, what it’s like to go from losing a parent to being a parent, the art of memoir, the nature of friendship, or what it’s like to be Zoom buddies with a prince, this essay is a must read.
It’s also unexpectedly funny.
There’s a moment when the ghostwriter’s family is being stalked by papazzarri, and he doesn’t know who else might understand, so he calls Prince Harry.
“It was like telling Taylor Swift about a bad breakup,” he writes. “It was like singing ‘Hallelujah’ to Leonard Cohen.”
Also in the essay:
Some wisdom on friendship from William Blake
A beautiful idea from Tennyson
The Guinness World Record that this ghostwriter and Prince Harry achieved
The sentence: “Empathy is thin gruel compared with the marrow of experience.”
The line: “if you don’t speak your emotions you serve them, and if you don’t tell your story you lose it—or, what might be worse, you get lost inside it.”
It’s also about collaboration, and loneliness, and editing, and being an overthinker.
“Mornings are my worry time,” he writes, “along with afternoons and evenings.”
Hahahaha. I love this guy.
His name is J. R. Moehringer, and he is well worth your time. This is a ghost worth listening to.
After reading the essay
What did you think? Let me know what stuck out to you, and we can continue the conversation here in the comments.
“House style” is a set of rules about spelling and grammar for a given publication, created to maintain internal consistency. For example, whether a publication uses the Oxford comma—or whether they use diacritical marks like the diaeresis—is a matter of house style.
I'm with Claire on this--I have no interest in following the Royals (even though her nonladyship matriculated at NU and I got all these gossipy bits from her sorority sisters about protecting her from the papparazzi) (and, okay, I also love The Crown) (okay, I'm lying), but now that I know this piece is really about ghostwriting, I'm beelining to my bathroom built-in magazine rack, where my New Yorkers go to die.
Have you ever been approached to ghost write something? Back in 2000, I was invited to ghost write the biography of Scoutmaster James Dale, who was an Eagle Scout and sued the BSA for keeping him from being a Scoutmaster because he was gay. It went all the way to the Supreme Court, if you remember, and basically broke the Boy Scouts. I, too am a gay Eagle Scout, and so I was a natural fit. But it was a topical issue and they wanted me to churn out a blockbuster within a month or so, and I was all ARTY WRITER. The hoops they make you jump through--of course they didn't want art, they wanted a clear narrative, but they wanted a narrative before the story was over, before the Supreme Court ruling, and I saw the limits of my skills. This is a long way of saying I have tremendous respect for ghost writers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_Scouts_of_America_v._Dale
I loved that piece--read it on a whim months ago and was kinda blown away. I must say--I think I was prejudiced against ghostwriters because I thought of them as some kind of failed writers (which if you think about it coming from me is hysterical.) May I just say--I clearly had no clue? In fact, now I’m like, “hmmmm...ghostwriting...maybe best of all possible worlds?” In any case--it was the insightful, funny, and poignant. And I loved that paparazzi scene. It also makes me like Harry even more. I think I’m now going to go reread it, since due to a cancelled meeting I have four glorious unscheduled and ope hours today...😉