Anne Louise Lovett

Ghosting: A Double Life

 by Jennie Erdal

Doubleday, New York, 2005

ISBN 0-385-51426-3

Does anyone else have what I call the “cover test” for a book?  If I interrupt my reading in order to close the book (finger firmly keeping my place) and gaze at the cover, I know I’m not just admiring the cover art—I’ve found a keeper, one I’ll go back and read again. Maybe this is just my way of slowing down the book’s inevitable end. I found myself turning to the cover of Ghosting more than once.

 At the end of 1980, language expert Jennie Erdal, then the mother of three small children and living in Scotland, was called upon to use her background in Russian studies and philosophy to translate the memoirs of painter Leonid Pasternak (father of Boris Pasternak, author of Dr. Zhivago.) After a series of events as improbable as Alice’s falling down a rabbit hole, she found herself in Wonderland—as the ghostwriter for a flamboyant London publisher of Middle Eastern origin, whom she refers to as Tiger. For fifteen years she wrote his books, his newspaper columns, and even his love letters.

Beautifully written, this memoir tells of the slightly-skewed reality of her time with Tiger as well as the all-too-real pain and joy of her personal life. At times hilarious, at times poignant, her memoir brims with wry and ironic observations. Tiger takes her to his retreat in the Dordogne region of France and instructs her to write a novel, although all she’s written for him previously is copy for his books on celebrities. She soon realizes that novel-reading does not prepare one for novel-writing, much less one written from the “outside in.” She struggles through, glad to be done with the chore, only to be rewarded with a request for a second novel.

She decides she will make this novel her own, written from the “inside out,” but Tiger insists that she include a scene featuring a favorite sexual fantasy of his. Erdal does not see how she can merge this scene with her plan for the novel, and is certain they will win the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex Award. She plunges gamely onward, helped by her writing ability. Surprisingly, she manages to get decent reviews for the novel (except for the dreaded scene.)

About this second novel, she concludes: What I discovered was that writing has a lot to do with unlocking secrets that are inside you. . .and that as you write you create the shapes and patterns that emerge later in your life. She goes on to say Imagination is rooted in memory and experience. And often what we imagine is what we are then impelled to live out. Through writing we are not so much creating a new pattern as uncovering one that is already in us. There is interplay, only dimly understood, between the novels and life. Writing is always personal. You reveal yourself to yourself. , That second novel . . . was about the letting go of pain. It also contained the genesis of a resolve: to give up the ghost.

Erdal gains wisdom and perspective on life and writing, and as her own personality emerges from the shadows, she realizes she has to break free of the overweening presence of Tiger in order to fulfill herself as a writer. In this memoir she has done so beautifully.

Secrets of the Zona Rosa: How Writing (and Sisterhood) Can Change Women’s Lives

By Rosemary Daniell

Henry Holt & Co., May 2006

384pp. $15.00

ISBN 0-8050-7780-4

“Had anyone told me [in 1975] that I would spend the next two and a half decades helping other women find themselves as writers,” says Rosemary Daniell in Secrets of the Zona Rosa, “I would have shaken my head in protest. If I had imagined that I would spend hour upon hour obsessing over how to cajole, stimulate, shock, and tickle them into recognizing their own gifts, reading  and marking up their manuscripts with purple ink. . .I would have run in the other direction.”

But aren’t we glad she did? This book, part memoir, part writing instruction, distills the methods Rosemary Daniell  has used to cajole and inspire her students and fellow writers in her Zona Rosa workshops, freeing creativity and bringing out the potential of women (and men) who never thought they could do it—women who were “struggling in the sorghum syrup of middle-class expectations.”

What is Zona Rosa? Literally, the “pink zone” in Spanish, it stands for the feminine principle. Daniell is an unabashed feminist—the kind more likely to celebrate femininity with stiletto heels and a plunging neckline than deny it with a burnt bra and combat boots, and this is the attitude she brings to her work—you don’t have to be dour and humorless to be a serious writer. (”Why Serious Babes Want to Have Fun” is part of a chapter subheading)

The intriguing chapter headings—“We Are All Doors Until Someone Slams Us”, “If I Thought Like a Guy”, “A Bevy of Perfect T.I.T.S”—lead the reader into discovering a sense of empowerment, cajole her into being patient and persevering, tickle her into digging deep, counsel her how to keep her sanity when the worst happens, and instruct her with tips to improve her prose.

The book overflows with delights as rich as a box of Godiva chocolates—books to read, quotations to meditate upon, and real-life examples to learn from. We suffer with the Zona Rosans as they lose loved ones or cope with a bad marriage and exult with those who go on to publish, gain a sense of wildness and freedom, or find a way to put their struggles into words. “Write the thing you don’t want to write about the most,” Rosemary counsels students as an “exorcise,” and women gain the ability to dig into hidden hurts—troubled  mothers, cruel fathers, the pain of racism—and by confronting them, as one opens the door on  a monster in the closet, make them lose their power.

The penultimate chapter, “A Chorus Line of Winning Legs” subheaded “To Take You Where You Want To Go” is all about dreaming big and taking steps to carry out your dream, giving examples of real-life women who made that happen. Throughout the book, Rosemary tells us to avoid certain “Knee-Jerk Reactions.” This chapter’s Knee-Jerk Reaction is “Imagining that great lives, great books, great poems—great anything!—come about without planning and, yes, hard if oft delicious, work That the process is less important than the rewards. And that they are not created by people like you and me.”

And if that isn’t sweet inspiration enough, she gives a recipe for strawberry cake in the appendix.

Rosemary Daniell, the prize-winning author of seven books of prose and poetry, lives in Savannah, and can be reached at her website, www.myzonarosa.com

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