‘We are on our way to Oxford, the dazzling publisher and I, to visit a woman as old as the century. It has the feel of an adventure, the beginning of something . . . Anything counting as a significant happening usually involves the chance occurrence of a number of events. Each event means nothing in isolation, or so it seems at the time, but taken together and viewed from the ringside seat that is given to us by hindsight, each turns out to have played a part in what Raymond Chandler liked to call the Start of Something Big. The particular events that led to my journey from London to Oxford in the back of a Rolls Royce . . . were something of a rag-bag.’
It is a Saturday morning in 1981 and Jennie Erdal is embarking on a journey with the man she calls ‘Tiger’, the flamboyant figure at the centre of Ghosting, the strange and gripping story of the twenty years in which she became his ghost writer, pulling the wool over the eyes of reviewers and turning him into the literary lion he had always wanted to be.
They first met in London in the early 1980s, he a bold independent publisher, she a translator with a young family, excited when Tiger asked her to join his firm as a commissioning editor. So far, so ordinary perhaps.
But Tiger didn’t want just to publish books, he wanted to write them. Erdal needed an income, and gradually over the years she was drawn into a weird, symbiotic relationship as she created a whole literary oeuvre in Tiger’s name, even turning his ludicrous plot ideas and sexual fantasies into novels that were seriously and admiringly reviewed.
There is much more to the story, but the real joy of Erdal’s brilliant memoir is in the telling. Ghosting is a wickedly funny book, but it is also a thoughtful look at deception and self-deception and the masks that most of us wear.
Please read on for an extract, along with a selection of recommendations for other tempting reading.
With best wishes, as ever, from the SF staff
Jess, Isabel, Rebecca, Izzy & Jennie
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