Available as eBook
Ghosting is a remarkable account of one woman’s life - or, to be more accurate, lives.
For fifteen years, Jennie Erdal had a double existence: officially she worked as a personal editor for one particular man - Tiger - but in reality she was his ghost-writer and in some mysterious sense his alter ego. During this time she wrote a great deal that appeared under his name - from personal letters and business correspondence to newspaper columns, novels and full length books.
Ghosting moves from a vivid evocation of an austere upbringing in Fife to superbly rendered portraits of the people with whom Jennie Erdal worked at a London-based publishing house, chief among them Tiger, the larger-than-life character with whom the author had a unique and symbiotic relationship; professionally hidden, yet somehow truthful and intimate. This moving and beautifully written memoir is laced throughout with rich, quiet comedy and profound insights into what it means to be human and to live in language.
Ghosting is a meditation on words, identity and creativity, but above all it is a portrait of a uniquely intimate relationship between a man and a woman.
“Jennie Erdal set a benchmark for candour and wisdom when she wrote about her 15-year association with Niam Attallah in the brilliant memoir Ghosting”
independent
See more reviews
“A little masterpiece about a relationship, superbly written in a down to earth style, and as enjoyable as a good novel”
sunday Times
“If this were simply a ghost-and-tell book, it would be of interest only to a very limited number of the London literati. But it is much, much more than that; it is a beautifully composed memoir; sometimes rather desperate, sometimes very funny, of an extraordinary symbiotic relationship between two very different people”
mail On Sunday
“Jennie Erdal has written a book that is hugely enjoyable to read, touches on profound questions about language and writing and provides a vivid and often affectionate, but fairly merciless, portrait of an exasperating, despotic, self-deluding but in the end likable figure, with the tantrums of a small child and the plumage of a peacock”
spectator
Jennie Erdal
Jennie Erdal worked as an editor and translator for many years. Ghosting, the first book published under her own name, was shortlisted for the Saltire Society First Book Award and the J.R. Ackerley Prize; it was also a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week.