Who Wrote Andre Agassi Autobiography

[Manases Blakemore]

Thenthere are the top-secret ghostwriters, for whom receiving no credit is part of the deal. In 1957, when John F. Kennedy accepted the Pulitzer Prize for his non-fiction book Profiles in Courage, he somehow forgot to mention that the work had been heavily ghosted by his speechwriter Ted Sorensen.

When the relationship between subject and ghost goes pear-shaped, juicy revelations follow. It happened again in 2019, when the Instagram influencer Caroline Calloway fell out with her longtime ghostwriting partner Natalie Beach.

My late friend Clive James was a prolific emailer. One of the trickiest things about corresponding with the great man was trying to recommend books to him that he hadn\\u2019t already read. It was like walking a tightrope, which you could fall off in two ways.

One way was to recommend a book so well-known that you would look like a rube for thinking anyone hadn\\u2019t read it. The other danger lay in recommending something that was obscure for good reason \\u2013 i.e. because it was tripe.

I once thought I\\u2019d found the ideal needle-threading recommendation for him: Open, the 2009 autobiography of Andre Agassi. For starters, the book was freakishly good. It was also fairly obscure, at least in literary terms. Recommending it would not be a gaffe on par with recommending, say, War and Peace. Seriously, what were the odds that Clive James was already an aficionado of Andre Agassi\\u2019s prose?

But he was. On the Agassi issue, Clive was way ahead of me. He\\u2019d read the bald maestro\\u2019s book when it came out, and he was a big fan. He gave Agassi high marks for his general sensitivity \\u2013 and for confirming that Jimmy Connors, behind the scenes, was exactly as obnoxious as he seemed on TV.

Hidden away at the back of Agassi\\u2019s book was a salute to its ghostwriter, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist J. R. Moehringer. \\u201CI asked J. R. many times to put his name on this book,\\u201D Agassi wrote. But Moehringer wouldn\\u2019t have it. He insisted that the story the book told was Agassi\\u2019s, and nobody else\\u2019s name belonged on its cover.

Agassi let his ghost have his way, but paid tribute to him in the book\\u2019s acknowledgments. \\u201CThis book would not exist without my friend J. R. Moehringer,\\u201D he wrote. It sounded like a cliche, but it was clear that Agassi literally meant it.

Not that the peculiar excellence of Agassi\\u2019s book was all down to Moehringer. It also had a lot to do with Agassi\\u2019s own high standards. For instance, it was Agassi himself \\u2013 not his agent or publisher \\u2013 who had the acumen to handpick Moehringer to ghost the book. After reading Moehringer\\u2019s memoir The Tender Bar, Agassi knew that Moehringer was just the man he needed to give his story the right shape and sound \\u2013 to write the book Agassi would have written himself, if he\\u2019d spent his life learning to tame words instead of tennis balls.

Back then, Moehringer was not a household name. He still isn\\u2019t, even though everyone in the world is currently talking about his latest book. , and its nominal author is \\u2013 in case you haven\\u2019t got wind of this \\u2013 Prince Harry. Moehringer\\u2019s name doesn\\u2019t appear on the cover of Spare. Neither does much else, apart from the giant self-pitying face of the chronically downtrodden prince.

For all I know, Moehringer gets a hearty shout-out in the acknowledgements of Harry\\u2019s book. To find out for sure I would have to buy it, and I\\u2019m not going to do that. Waging his insufferable pre-publicity campaign for Spare, Harry finally seemed to prove that there is a hard limit to the public\\u2019s appetite for him. He presented the rare spectacle of a man flying too close to the sun while jumping the shark.

As long as publishers keep commissioning books from people who have no idea how to write them, the art of ghostwriting will thrive. There are three basic kinds of ghostwriter. There\\u2019s the old-school credited ghostwriter, whose name is frankly revealed on the cover.

Unacknowledged ghosts like Sorensen get no glory, but the hush money can be good. I may or may not have done this kind of uncredited ghostwriting myself. If I had, I wouldn\\u2019t be allowed to tell you.

Then there\\u2019s a third category of ghostwriter \\u2013 a category that Moehringer pretty much invented. Moehringer is the ghostwriter as star. He\\u2019s so good at what he does that the people who use him want everyone to know he\\u2019s involved, whether his name appears on the cover or not.

Working to a tight deadline, O\\u2019Hagan did his best to coax a book out of Assange. But Assange was recalcitrant. O\\u2019Hagan found it excruciatingly hard to make him sit down for interviews, or otherwise commit to the work. And when O\\u2019Hagan finally knocked up a manuscript, Assange refused to sign off on it.

This was a big tactical blunder on Assange\\u2019s part. The publishers issued the book anyway, under the title Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography. Then O\\u2019Hagan published a long tell-all essay about the affair called Ghosting, which later reappeared in his collection The Secret Life.

For years, Beach had co-written the captions for Calloway\\u2019s Instagram pix. Then the pair tried to collaborate on a full-length Calloway memoir, for which a credulous publisher had laid down a six-figure advance.

When that project imploded, Beach published an essay entitled I Was Caroline Calloway, in which she spilled the beans about the confected nature of Calloway\\u2019s online persona. After years of working as Calloway\\u2019s underloved ghost, Beach was already a powderkeg of resentment. All that remained was for Calloway to make the mistake of lighting the fuse.

\\u201CNo man is a hero to his valet,\\u201D said Napoleon, or one of his uncredited writers. Similarly, few pseudo-authors are heroes to their ghosts. When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, the ghostwriter of his 1987 book The Art of the Deal felt bound to warn America that Trump was a dangerous man, whose election might \\u201Clead to the end of civilisation.\\u201D Trump was elected anyway, perhaps because his fan base did not view the end of civilisation as a bad thing.

To date, Moehringer has never gone rogue and told the unvarnished truth about any of his subjects. In the case of Spare, he\\u2019s got a million American reasons to keep his mouth shut. That\\u2019s 1.43 million Australian reasons. We can only imagine the book Moehringer would have written if Harry had ever made the mistake of upsetting him. Now that\\u2019s a book I\\u2019d want to read.

What do these cases have in common? One concern is that they are deceptive; they sneakily violate certain expectations you are supposed to follow. This is the argument against self-plagiarism given by Jonathan Bailey in the context of a long-ago self-plagiarism (and plagiarism) scandal by the science writer Jonah Lehrer.

If you think the Connelly scenario is weird, consider that in 2009, Malcolm Gladwell produced a best-seller called What the Dog Saw. It contains 18 previously published New Yorker articles by Gladwell (all freely available, at the time, online). A monstrous crime? No, because this overlap was explicitly noted on the back cover (though, interestingly, not on the front cover).

More usual is misdemeanor plagiarism. This includes sloppy note-taking, unfamiliarity with the rules (there are big cultural differences as to what sort of copying/paraphrasing is acceptable), glitches in memory, or honest confusion about who has an idea first. Usually, these cases are easy to discover because there is no ill intent and no attempt at a coverup.

Misdemeanor plagiarism is wrong. One should be more careful; one should know the rules; and so on. And even when the right care is taken, there are times when people have to take responsibility for honest mistakes. But generally, when these cases are discovered, the miscreant should apologize and work to do better in the future, and that should be the end of things.

I'm with you on ghostwriting. In nonfiction, it makes sense that somebody might have valuable expertise to share, but writing is not part of that expertise, so they hire someone to help them out. But why not credit that person?

A couple of yeras ago, I read a historical fiction book by a new author (who I will not name here) that instantly became an all-time favorite. The author put out a new book - also historical fiction - last year that I recently started reading.

Curious about the author's chosen subject, I started doing some research. It did not take me long to realize that entire pages and paragraphs of this author's new book had been lifted verbatim from other - pretty readily available - sources.

On the one hand, there's no denying that the author has arranged and woven these lifted passages into something more than what they were originally. The author, in a sense, pasted together a kind of literary collage to communicate new ideas.

On the other hand, I remember, back when I was a film student, a professor of mine talking about the cinematic technique known as "pastiche" (for those unfamiliar, the practice of borrowing visual motifs, compositions and techniques from other films and filmmakers).

There\u2019s been a big fuss about plagiarism over the last few months, culminating in the resignation of the Harvard president. By now, people are thoroughly sick of the topic. Perfect time for a post!

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