I’m going to break the Rumpus rule against pop culture here for a minute. (Hell, it’s Saturday.) It’s only to note Gwyneth Paltrow’s complaint, this week, that the New York Times was incorrect in its report that Paltrow used a ghostwriter on her cookbook. I do not care too much about Paltrow’s case, though I suspect that the (alleged!) ghostwriter in question — a woman named Julia Turshen — is having a no-good, very-bad week. I can’t seem to find a comment from her anywhere. In my mind’s eye, she’s sitting in a room twitching somewhere, her contract with Paltrow taped over her mouth.
More than a few Rumpus readers make their living by ghostwriting, I’d guess. It’s not something I’ve done myself, but knowing so many wonderful writers who do it activates my latent mama bear tendencies. Step off, Paltrow. You’re like the boss at the company claiming your underlings don’t exist, all those titanic CEOs claiming they deserve those salaries because they’ve steered the ship well, as though there were no engineers in the boiler room.
Big Important People’s anxiety about ghostwriting is interesting in only a limited way. Paltrow’s skittish need to run all over the media this week declaring sole authorship is not based in legitimate concern, as far as I can see. There may be a few fans out there in the world who believe these big book products to be little vials of captured sweat, drawn direct from the source’s brow. But they are few. For the rest of us, these products are something we can put on an e-reader and read, and/or use to whip up a little gluten-free macrobiotic lime-rosemary focaccia, before we have to dive back into To the Lighthouse. So the culprit here is ego, a celebrity who worries that any chip in her varnish will bring the whole house down. How exhausting it must be to be that kind of person.
It’s not just these high fliers who want their book to be theirs, theirs, theirs, though. So many writers I know start to shuffle their feet the moment it’s suggested they had help with their work. I don’t know why. I promise not to get too drearily undergraduate about this, but the fact is that most books do not spring forth fully-formed from the author’s forehead. And by that I do not mean that they are plaigiarized. I just mean: sometimes the input comes from an editor and sometimes it comes from a friend or a writing group. Sometimes, it’s your husband. Sometimes it’s the conversation you overhear in a coffee shop that just has to go in the book, it’s perfect. Sometimes the input is welcome to the author, and sometimes, it’s not. I’m not sure why literary culture can’t get over this, why we want every book to be written in a dark room with a closed door, but well, we can’t. We want to believe that pure inspiration exists, that the point is not to interfere with it.
Is it that we’re worried we’ll never produce anything, ourselves?
