By: Nina, Norfolk, Virginia
A.B. Replies: Let's see if we can figure it out from parsing a small piece of Teri Hatcher's new memoir:
"Toast," Hatcher muses. "Think about it for a moment. It probably has the simplest recipe in the world: one ingredient, one instruction. Still, you know when you're trying to make it, and you just can't get it right?"
Well, I don't know about you, but my heart just stopped! It's like she's looking right into our souls--if not our stomachs.
No way could someone write that without help from a professional, right? Well, according to a spokesperson for Hyperion, Hatcher's publisher, the actress penned that all alone, with no aid from a ghostwriter. Armed only with the ingredients in her refrigerator, Hatcher apparently has crafted 224 pages of pithy, crunchy and probably whole-grain prose.
"She wrote it herself!" Hyperion spokeswoman Beth Dickey tells this B!tch.
If that impresses you, consider that adorable chipmunk of a girl from the new Dr. Who. She's Billie Piper, she's huge in the U.K., she's 23, and according to reports, she just signed a $9.3 million deal to pen three tell-all memoirs.
"She has been offered a ghostwriter," a Piper source told a London paper last month, "but she wants to have a crack at writing it herself."
In fact, some celebrities are so very natural at writing, they can churn out entire autobiographies without ever, once, picking up a book. (Victoria Beckham has said that she's never read a book in her "whole life." But she is credited with writing one.)
How lucky we are that so many celebrities have latent writing talent! (In England, half of last year's bestselling autobiographies were penned by stars.) Otherwise, we'd be stuck reading Elie Wiesel's Night: A Memoir (again), and we'd probably grow so depressed we'd end up drowning ourselves in our bathtubs surrounded by yahrzeit candles.
The truth, Nina, is this: Many, many celebrity "authors" use ghostwriters. Stars don't want to admit they use ghostwriters, and most consumers don't really care. Lastly, ghostwriters know that they will be living on macaroni and cheese for the rest of their lives if they ever broadcast their participation in, say, oh, The Truth About Diamonds by Nicole Richie. The ghostwriter's career would be over, of course. Celebrities would shun them, and real writers would laugh them right out of their ascot-laden literary circles.
"There are probably more ghostwriters for celebs than for noncelebs," says Sara Nelson, editor in chief of Publishers Weekly. "In some arrangements, ghostwriters are required to sign NDAs, but sometimes the news gets out anyway, as in the case of Hillary Clinton's memoir, which was cowritten by Maryanne Vollers. Sometimes the co-author holds the copyright with the celebrity, sometimes not. Sometimes the co-author gets a flat fee, and sometimes they also get to partake of some of the royalties."
In rare cases, stars are honest. Take Esera Tuaolo, a former Minnesota Viking who came out of the closet in 2002. He penned his emotional memoir this year and has publicly credited his writing partner, John Rosengren.
Other times, tell-all book covers will have the names of the cowriters right on the front, under the star's name. But not often. Usually, these days anyway, it's New York Times rock writer Neil Strauss, whose name is slapped on books "by" Jenna Jameson, Marilyn Manson, Dave Navarro and Mõtley Crüe.
I leave you now with an excerpt from Pam Anderson's novel, Star, ghostwritten by a guy named Eric Shaw Quinn, who is not (if you'll notice) Pam Anderson:
"She had a sense that something was missing, like that feeling you get when you stand looking into the refrigerator, not really hungry, but unable to stop looking, the feeling that this time it might be there, right behind the ketchup and the pickled beets."