Open Agassi Ghostwriter

[Manric Hock]

Ithas been speculated that the choice of ghostwriter came through the Clooneys, close friends of both the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. George Clooney, an actor, director and producer, worked on a big-screen adaptation of Moehringer's 2005 memoir The Tender Bar. Released in 2021, the film stars Tye Sheridan as Moehringer and Ben Affleck as his Uncle Charlie, his mother's older brother. Affleck was nominated for both a Golden Globe and SAG Award in the Best Supporting Actor category for his performance. The book is a coming-of-age tale, told through Moehringer's experiences coming back to the same local bar in his twenties, and was a major success when it was released.

It was this book that caught the attention of retired tennis star Agassi, who in 2009 approached the writer to help him with his own autobiography, Open: An Autobiography. In it, he divulged that he had suffered at the hands of a controlling father during his childhood, and that he had hated tennis as a result. He also opened up about testing positive for methamphetamine in 1997, which resulted in other players asking for him to return his trophies. It was a number one best-seller and has been named as one of the best sports memoirs ever written.

His next project was the 2012 book Sutton, about the bank robber Willie Sutton, whose 40-year career in robbery saw him stealing an estimated $2 million. He then returned to sports - in a manner of speaking - by writing Nike co-founder Phil Knight's 2016 memoir Shoe Dog, which was lauded by billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

You might or might not like Andre Agassi and you might or might not be able to forgive him for lying about his use of crystal meth. But there seems to be one point on which book critics will be able to agree: When it comes to his memoir, Agassi displayed great taste in his choice of ghostwriter.

"Open: An Autobiography" sports Agassi's own name on the cover. However, the ghostwriter behind the scenes was J.R. Moehringer, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of "The Tender Bar," an acclaimed memoir of his own.

Michael Mewshaw, reviewing "Open" for the Washington Post, offers credit to Agassi as well. "[I]t's both astonishing and a pleasure to report that Andre Agassi, who was castigated for an ad campaign saying 'Image is everything,' has produced an honest, substantive, insightful autobiography," Mershaw writes.

But Mewshaw too closes his review by considering some of the "inspired choices" that Agassi has made later in life. Right up there with marrying Steffi Graf, says Mewshaw, was "finding a terrific ghostwriter."

According to Mewshaw, "Open" is "extraordinary," a book that "vividly recounts a lost childhood, a Dickensian adolescence and a chaotic struggle in adulthood to establish an identity that doesn't depend on alcohol, drugs or the machinations of PR."

However, she concedes, "Somebody on the memoir team has great gifts for heart-tugging drama" and her review traces the same path backward into Agassi's painful childhood with a driven father determined to make his son a winner, regardless of the personal toll it might take on the boy.

As a writer, Mewshaw has covered pro tennis for years and thus may have more appetite for the game than Maslin, who complains that 'Open' devotes a lot of space to thumbnail descriptions of matches and opponents, a litany that would drone on without dynamic, writerly flourishes."

In the end, though, for Mewshaw too, the book's true appeal lies off the court. "While not without excitement, Agassi's comeback to No. 1 is less uplifting than his sheer survival, his emotional resilience and his good humor in the face of the luckless cards he was often dealt," he writes.

The big revelations in the book seem to be Agassi's use of crystal meth (about which he lied when caught), his outright dislike of the game of tennis, and the fact that his famous mullets may have been part-toupee.

For some of the reading public, of course, knowing that much may be enough. After seeing Agassi interviewed by Katie Couric on "60 Minutes," Meredith McKenna, writing for the Examiner, confesses: "I already feel inspired ... to not finish reading."

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Great analysis as always! I was wondering about italics too. I liked them when I saw them used for dialogue most recently in Sarah Broom's The Yellow House. They made the dialogue feel more authentic somehow, but I could never put my finger on it the way you did. Honestly I mostly just thought it was cool.

Writing a book, like renovating a house, is an unending series of decisions. First person or third? Past tense or present? By the time you get down to choosing how to punctuate your dialogue (in renovation terms this is something like choosing your interior doors), the temptation is to wearily lay down your head and say, Can\u2019t someone else choose? Are there really even options for this?

These doubly-reinforced quotation marks create a firm and impenetrable barrier between what\u2019s spoken and the surrounding prose. Steinbeck (the author of the passage above) would himself presumably say \u201CGod\u2019s sake.\u201D It\u2019s his character George who says \u201CGod\u2019 sakes.\u201D No voice particles risk slipping from one side of the door to the other; your guests will never be confused.

But, if you\u2019re feeling a bit more daring (daring, that is, if you\u2019re American), you could go with the tasteful minimalism of the British single-quotation mark, as David Foster Wallace does in Infinite Jest.

The door between the surrounding prose and the dialogue is still impenetrable \u2014 but the heavy, rusting ironwork of those double-quotation marks has been replaced with a layer of airy glass. \u201CThe both of you\u201D is a good piece of hearing \u2014 it belongs to the character of Emil \u2014 but it\u2019s also, thanks to that single quotation mark, Wallace\u2019s. The fineness of the punctuational barrier encourages us to remember, and to appreciate, that the author is after all the one doing a voice.

The door has here come off altogether, and in its place we have something like the velvet ropes they use to cordon off rooms in a historic house. The distinction between narrative and dialogue has become daringly slight. The author\u2019s voice redounds audibly throughout the space.

The only thing separating the speech from the narration now is our own weightless awareness \u2014 we have lost the armature of punctuation altogether. The most famous punctuation-abjurer is Cormac McCarthy (the author of the passage above). The most effective \u2014 or anyway the most effective that I\u2019ve come across lately \u2014 is Andre Agassi.

For years people had been telling me that Agassi\u2019s memoir Open was \u201Cactually\u201D good. With that actually people were nodding toward a truth universally acknowledged: that sports memoirs are, as a rule, dreadful. Colorless recitations of long-irrelevant contests punctuated by high school graduation bromides, pasted together by some poor, hurried ghostwriter, spaced as generously as the publisher\u2019s self-respect will allow. And by these standards Open is indeed a work of genius.

But even by ordinary standards Open is good. Quite good, actually. J.R. Moehringer (who wrote his own affable memoir before becoming the world\u2019s most sought-after ghost-memoirist) contributed mightily to its polish. I read it in a week \u2014 a YouTube window featuring years-old matches often open beside me \u2014 and was sorry when it was over. And much of its goodness \u2014 its surprising force and propulsion \u2014 has to do with Agassi\u2019s (or Moehringer\u2019s) decision to let its dialogue go naked.

My arm feels like it\u2019s going to fall off. I want to ask, How much longer, Pops? But I don\u2019t ask. I do as I\u2019m told. I hit as hard as I can, then slightly harder. On one swing I surprise myself by how hard I hit, how cleanly. Though I hate tennis, I like the feeling of hitting a ball dead perfect. It\u2019s the only peace.

The prose is speedy and serviceable; the psychology is believable and complex (Agassi\u2019s hatred of tennis \u2014 and his dependence on the relief it brings him \u2014 will be with him his entire life). And by placing his father\u2019s words within the stream of his own voice, Agassi has transformed them from being lines in a bad biopic flashback into something more intimate: words spoken to us across a table, now. This is Agassi\u2019s story, not his father\u2019s, and it is, like tennis, a solo performance.

You know that special tone that people use, in telling a story, when they\u2019re quoting something that someone said to them? They don\u2019t do an impression of the speaker, exactly, but they give their voice a slight lift; they shift something in their shoulders. This is what Agassi does, with his punctuation-less dialogue throughout the book, and it creates a series of pleasing di-chords: we hear Agassi\u2019s voice and his father\u2019s; Agassi\u2019s voice and Brooke Shields\u2019s.

And so the words of others \u2014 since they are played, from the first, on the instrument of Agassi\u2019s own voice \u2014 slip naturally from the realm of hearing into the realm of thought. Hit harder becomes a leitmotif throughout the book, appearing spontaneously in Agassi\u2019s head over decades, during matches, during hospital-room visits. His father\u2019s words have been incorporated into his very cells.

The choice to omit quotation marks, for all its apparent radicalism \u2014 the grammatical version of Agassi\u2019s signature Def Leppard haircut \u2014 turns out to be an act of bare and vulnerable honesty. All dialogue belongs, finally, to the author, just as all perception belongs, finally, to the perceiver. We stand at the baseline alone.

I'm ghostwriting full-time now, and you're right; there's so much that goes into capturing the subject's voice. I record every word and I work almost exclusively from the transcripts so they sound like themselves. I'll say this about Britney's ghost--he wasn't paid enough, no matter how much he received. I'll always choose a CEO's book over celebrity because every ghost knows the "cool" factor of being with celebs wears off quickly. And I'm learning that all of us have to deal with the "I never said that" argument, despite the subject being on audio AND video.

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