A Ghostwriter Attends a Debut Author Event

What constitutes a famous writer? Will I ever be one? And why do I meet all my writer friends online?

I love debut author events. 

I love the bubbling excitement, the undercurrent of clumsiness, the first-time feeling that sparkles through the room. I love the inevitable crowd of family members and forgotten high school friends who pretend to be ultra close with the writer of the hour. 

When the author thanks the crowd for being here and the bookstore for hosting, I imagine them practicing these lines while polishing up their manuscript or during an especially brutal round of revisions. They call their book things like my baby or this little story, and I wonder if they’ve rehearsed this moment in their bedroom or while brushing their teeth, or maybe just in their dreams. 

Yes, they have. And I do it, too. 

The burden of the ghostwriter is light—write the book, disappear. Simple and incredibly complicated. I got into this career for, say it with me, the money, but I stayed in it for the people. What a privilege to sit with someone and capture their stories—the pretty and painful and private—and reflect those details back in a way that doesn’t just make sense; it sings. 

But these books are not my babies. If anything, I’m just the nanny. I get the pride, but never any slice of attention, dare I say fame. Maybe that’s why I started a TikTok to talk about ghostwriting, just to feel like I matter in some small way. Maybe that’s why, when I found a debut YA author while scrolling TikTok this summer, I called a $40 Lyft to The Book Cellar in Chicago just to attend his second in a string of debut book events. I wanted to see him in the limelight. I wanted to catch a bit of that glow.

It was one of those sticky July days that Chicago serves up just to keep us in line, and I stepped into a crowded store, paid another $40 for two glasses of bad wine and a copy of the book, then took my post near the cash register. A friendly bookstore employee did the usual thank you spiel and introduced debut author Jeff Bishop in conversation with bestselling author Liz Lawson, talking through the process of publishing and the not-so-veiled similarities between Jeff’s book and his own life. There were earnest moments and clearly well-worn jokes that landed among his hometown audience, and then they opened the room up for Q&A, as they always do, and a small voice asked a question that made every writer in the room flinch. 

“Any tips on dealing with fame?” 

Jeff laughed, fixed his hair, and smiled nervously. “We write books,” he said. “We’re not really that famous.” 

All three of these people have written phenomenal books, but only two of them can take credit. (L to R: Me, Jeff Bishop, and Liz Lawson)

Turn back the clock two hours, when I picked up my phone after leaving it on Do Not Disturb for what should’ve been five hours of writing but was definitely at least 10% searching for split ends. I stomached a justified amount of disappointment at how few notifications I’d missed, but I did have one missed call and two texts from my friend Ella, whose book went to market just eight days prior.

The first text was just my name. The second was, “I sold my book.” 

I called her back and we squealed at a pitch that made my dog sound off. Ella gushed to me about all the wonderful, entirely deserved praise the editor at the imprint gave her. Questions about what she would write next. Phrases like film rights and international rights, all of it putting a pressure behind my nose and a lightness in my feet. I can’t think of anyone who deserves it more. Today, she is my friend. Tomorrow, a New York Times bestselling author. I’m sure of it. Hopefully she’ll remember me when she’s taking interviews with Roxane Gay. 

“Any tips on dealing with fame?” 

After years of internet friendship, I also met Ella in person for the first time this summer! Check her out at @brosandprose wherever you choose to keep up with your favorite writers.

Friends, I am not famous. I have just shy of 70,000 TikTok followers, more than a few of whom think my name is Bree, plenty of whom probably wouldn’t remember why they followed me in the first place. (The girl who did the John Mulaney conspiracy video? The ghostwriter? Wait, I thought that was Fluently Forward. I’ll unfollow now.) I’ve been recognized only once, and I’d argue it was a top ten moment for me, a crumb of a taste of what it would be like for my name to be anything to anyone. I have written a few dozen books that you like and probably a few that you hate. I talk about them vaguely on the internet. At best, I am a very niche TikTok micro-celebrity. At worst, I am a girl with an iPhone who likes to talk about writing. 

And still, I want to matter. I want to write things that move people. I want to sell my book to a major imprint and I want to have conversations in bookstores that people gather for, where people raise their hands and ask me what my inspiration was for this book. 

I measure my age against other writers. He is 28. She is 30. I am freshly 27. I have time. Only a few years, I remind myself too often. Not long enough if I want a book on shelves in my twenties. Not long enough if I want to be published before my favorite middle school English teachers die. 

Turn back the clock two months with me. I’m sitting in Seattle at a Mexican restaurant on the water, across the table from my best friend on the planet. He is drinking something raspberry flavored and weighing his worry that he’s let down his high school voice teacher by taking his BFA and moving to the PNW to write poems and work a desk job. I tell him that he is not letting anyone down. He is happy, and that is what his teachers would’ve wanted for him most. I wipe salsa verde from my lip and admit that I worry about this, too. I’m not the published bestselling author I said I would be by now.

My best friend blinks at me so fast, you’d think he was blinking morse code for you are an idiot. I’ve ghostwritten so many bestsellers. They do not have my name on them, and no one will ever know they were written by me. I will never deal with fame. Not for those books, at least. 

He asks me how many authors I know who are in their thirties, forties, fifties. Lots, I say. 

Tonight, I’m scrolling TikTok again. The algorithm serves me a video of Liz Lawson, the other author from Jeff Bishop’s debut event. I know her work, so I pause and watch her tell me and the rest of the internet about her rejected manuscripts in her twenties, about how now, in her forties, she’s speaking to us from her comfy spot on the New York Times bestseller list. I have nothing but time. 

Before bed, I brush my teeth and I practice, like always: “thank you for being here, thank you to the bookstore for hosting, thank you for taking a chance on this little story…”