A Writer's Writer

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Four years ago, a London-based, Palestine-born publisher named Naim Attallah sent an overheated love letter to his wife. "The fire in my soul still burns as brightly as the moment I first looked upon you," it said, going on to cite Socrates, God and Philip Larkin. "When I think of you, there is no single name for what I feel, more a constant singing in my heart." But Attallah didn't write the letter — nor the 12 books; the hundreds of newspaper columns and magazine articles; or the countless other missives, from business letters to thank-you notes, that bore his name. For nearly 15 years, his every public word was composed by Jennie Erdal, who masqueraded as an editor at Attallah's London publishing firm but worked as his full-time ghostwriter.

Now Erdal tells all in Ghosting: A Memoir (Canongate; 273 pages), a meditation on literary identity and a surprisingly generous love letter to the person who reaped praise and prestige from her labors while keeping her in salaried obscurity. (Discreetly, she refers to him only as "Tiger," after the lifelike tiger-skin rug that adorned his lavish Soho office.) In 1981, Tiger hired Erdal, then an editor and translator on the east coast of Scotland, to develop Russian authors for his Quartet Books. She found him to be demanding, impetuous and thoroughly charming, with a child's enthusiasm and an immigrant's fractured English. "His sentences were a riot of hangers and danglers," she notes. She soon found herself wrestling not with Russian prose but with Tiger's, and that suited her fine. A soon-to-be-divorced mother of three small children, she needed the money, and Tiger didn't mind her working at home, 700 km from London.

The relationship began to fray only after he started asking for sex. Not the real kind — their relationship remained entirely professional — but the fictional kind. He decided to try his — or rather, their — hand at fiction. "We are thinking about a beautiful novel," he told her. "It will have a beautiful cover." He had his own ideas about what would go inside. "Have we reached the orgamsi [sic] yet?" he would ask, as Erdal struggled to meet his quota of sex scenes. She had a loftier view of literature. "I had believed all my life that writing was important, that the novel mattered, that readers should be able to trust the author," she writes. "Now I had sullied that belief."

Gradually, the novels began to reflect her own preoccupations. "The more I searched for his voice, the more I caught my own breaking through," she writes. She used the death of a child — her own single-mom fear at the time — as a plot device. That, plus Tiger's munificence, lavish parties and working trips to his French estate, helped make the job bearable. Yet the strain grew worse. "Can one write from another person's heart?" she asks. "It's like trying to fake sincerity." Erdal's misgivings came to a head after her new husband objected to Tiger's intrusiveness (47 phone calls in a single day). So she gave up the ghost, parting amicably with Tiger five years ago.

Erdal set about writing a novel of her own. "But this other story kept pressing on my frontal lobes," she said last week. So she wrote a few chapters about her years with Tiger and showed them to him. "He was very encouraging," she notes. "He said he could publish this. He gave me suggestions for what to put in, what to leave out. Very gradually he started to take control again. So I told him, 'No, it's me now, and it's quite different from the way it was.'"

What does Tiger think of the book? "He won't take my calls," Erdal laments. Now in his 70s, Attallah announced that he "did not recognize myself when I read it" before he stopped talking about the book altogether. He has reportedly declined to take legal action and has ordered his employees not to comment. But last month, with remarkable timing, Attallah's Quartet Books published his first book since 2000, a 64-page memoir, The Old Ladies of Nazareth, based on his childhood. Who wrote it? "I'm sure he did," says Erdal. "It's very different from his normal style. Or, shall we say, his previously published style."