I know
little about ghostwriting, other than having once, nearly 30 years ago
now, ghostwritten a ghost, my subject having shot himself three weeks
into our work on his memoirs. On our last day together he had asked how I
thought the book would go if he was found murdered, a question I felt
intended to drag me into yet another interminable conversation about the
people he believed were out to kill him—the banks, the CIA—and so, in
order to check what I thought was simply one more diversion, I’d
answered that I thought it would be a bestseller.
We had just come close to a fist fight
that had only ended when I noticed the gun he was carrying in a shoulder
holster as we tussled and shoved each other in a publisher’s office.
The gun frightened me and he knew it, but then he frightened me in a way
I had never felt frightened before.
His name
was John Friedrich, he was Australia’s greatest conman and corporate
criminal, and he was about to go to trial for embezzling a billion
dollars in today’s terms. With the money, he had set up a sort of secret
army with purported CIA connections, a large company employing over 500
people purportedly engaged in top-end search and rescue, industrial
safety and security operations, which had gone belly up.
Following the collapse, there ensued the
largest manhunt in Australia’s history as Friedrich was hunted across
the continent, and, once caught, the concurrence of criminality and
celebrity had inevitably led to a very large advance from a publisher
for Friedrich’s memoirs.
Being indisposed to leaving any record,
Friedrich failed to produce a manuscript and frightened off in quick
succession a series of ghostwriters set to work with him. In
desperation, the publisher told Friedrich that if he wouldn’t work with
the publisher’s choice of ghostwriter, he should find his own. Friedrich
knew no writers. But his bodyguard—a Tasmanian—said he had a mate who
wanted to be a writer.
And in this way, late one night in
Tasmania, where I was working as a builder’s laborer trying to write my
first novel, I received a phone call from Australia’s most wanted
offering me $10,000 to ghostwrite his memoir in the six weeks left
before he went to trial.
After Friedrich shot himself dead, his
suicide was front-page news and top of the TV news bulletins. The
publishers were everywhere, saying Friedrich had left a tell-all memoir
that answered all the many questions now being asked, but refusing to
divulge any details prior to publication. As well they wouldn’t, because
I was sitting in a Hobart pub desperately trying to make them up. Most
writers’ first novels are criticised as autobiography. My first
autobiography, though, was quickly degenerating into a novel. The book
came out and was an immediate failure. To be frank, it’s not much of a
book, or as much of a book as someone who has never written a book can
write in six weeks about their subject when their subject kills himself
before saying what his life was.
Still, I gained a lot from it, not least
money, which was good, if only, as the old joke goes, for financial
reasons. With the $10,000, I was able to stop laboring for six months
and finish my first novel, Death of a River Guide. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/richard-flanagan-on-social-media-and-the-death-of-a-private-life/
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