The accidental ghostwriter

No one is more surprised than me that I have become a ghostwriter; even more so that I have become a ghostwriter who specialises in misery memoir.

At no point in my early writing career did I have ghostwriting as an ambition, and for many years I had only the vaguest of ideas of what ghostwriting was. I was always interested in publishing my own work. And of course a ghostwriter writes on behalf of someone else, and allows that person to take all the credit.

As for misery memoir, I was not a fan of the genre; in fact, had never read any properly because it didn’t appeal. I liked reading and writing fiction and poetry. This particular kind of autobiography, usually dealing with the protagonist's triumph over personal trauma or abuse suffered during childhood, wasn’t really on my radar.

Most critics trace the beginning of the genre to A Child Called "It", the 1995 memoir by American Dave Pelzer, in which he details the trauma and abuse he suffered at the hands of his alcoholic mother. I was aware of this book’s existence, but wild horses couldn’t have dragged me to pick it up.

Yet misery memoir is an enormously well-selling genre. You’ll recognise the covers because they usually have sad looking children with big eyes on the front. Nearly three decades after Pelzer, its still booming businesss. Titles in the genre generally comprise around 10% of the top 100 books at any one time, though readership is estimated to be up to 90% female.

Somehow I have ended up writing six books in a bestselling series, the seventh is finished and in the final editing stages due for publication in April 2023. I write as the ghost for Louise Allen, so her name is on the front cover and she has all the rights. I get a little mention on the inside title panel: ‘With Theresa McEvoy’, which is my maiden name and the one I now use for ghostwriting. The first four books were with Trinity Mirror publishing - which most people will know as Mirror Group from the newspaper. The next three are with a smaller publishing house called Welbeck publishing, which is actually a lot more lucrative. And I love doing it.

So how did I get to this point?

There I am, in my very early teens. I was a very shy, awkward child who didn’t want to meet anyone’s gaze - I kept my eye hidden beneath that hair so that people wouldn’t speak to me.

Instead I read a lot, and lived in books, and had adventures in my head and thought I was Nancy Drew. And wrote a lot. I wrote terrible poems about the storm of ‘87 and the hostages in the first Gulf War and all the birds covered in oil, and I wrote incessantly in a journal, and I won all the writing prizes at school.

But the careers’ officer told me that writing wasn’t a career, it was a hobby, and anyway, a teenager couldn’t write because they had no life experience. So I went off and became a teacher, and tried to forget about writing. 

But I couldn’t. I taught secondary English and so I was always teaching writing and poetry, and I made sure that I always wrote alongside my students. I carried on writing my journals and my poems and my stories, and eventually I had a go at writing novels: I have six and a half completed crime and YA novels languishing in a drawer that were never published and received dozens of rejections. I really had got to the point of giving up, and had almost accepted the careers’ officer’s idea that writing really was just a hobby, when a friend of mine approached me to help him write his book.

I’ll call him Caleb.

He’d had an awful life, lived in 34 different foster and care homes after suffering abuse at the hands of his father and other adults who he should have been able to trust. Because he’d been busy surviving childhood rather than getting an education, he wasn’t very literate. So I took my ipad round and audio-recorded him and, over six sessions, we accumulated about eight hours’ worth of material.

On the advice of a ghostwriting friend, I first transcribed in full before using that as the source material for the book. The craft came in how to structure his story coherently from the memory fragments that he offered in order to build a compelling narrative. I found that process fascinating, combined with ensuring that it also contained enough hooks to keep a reader interested.

Remember that I hadn’t read misery memoir, so I wrote more like a crime novel, holding things back and planting clues. I finished the book in about 12 weeks, writing furiously over the summer holidays while I was still employed full-time as a teacher. Together we searched for an agent. Caleb and I picked five agents who dealt in this genre, sent off a covering letter, along with a chapter-by-chapter synopsis and a sample of the writing to all five.

I warned Caleb not to get his hopes up and explained that we’d be unlikely to hear anything for 8-10 weeks, and even then the news might not be good. I had that pile of rejected novels sitting in my drawer. I knew how this went.

But it turned out that I knew nothing. Within 48 hours we had two agents requesting the full manuscript. I honestly couldn’t believe it. But it meant we knew we were on to something good. We chose an agent and it all happened very swiftly.

Part of the process of writing this kind of misery memoir means that you have to be very careful about jigsaw identification. The threat of libel is very real and possible in this kind of writing, and so you have to be careful to disguise places and people while staying true to the original. With a big publisher like Mirror Books comes an experienced legal team, who were unhappy about some of the accusations that arose from the narrative. I had ghostwritten a book, but I didn’t consider myself (yet) to be a ghostwriter.

Meanwhile, the agent had showed a sample of my writing to someone on her books who was looking for a ghostwriter. My agent put us in touch, and we met and discussed the ideas. I wrote three synopses; Trinity Mirror picked two and gave us a two-book deal. I was paid an advance before I wrote a word: an experience that I found utterly terrifying.

But it enabled me to work part-time as a teacher to give me time to write the books. Those first two sold very well, and we were commissioned for two more - at nearly double the money of the first contract. The third book, Eden’s Story, did particularly well: the Thrown Away Children series was gathering momentum and it made it into the Sunday Times top ten bestseller list.

As well as being a relatively lucrative way to make money in the frugal world of writing, I get an enormous amount from ghostwriting.

I get experience of working with an editor and publisher, and I feel that I am honing my writing craft. There is enormous freedom in being handed a story to play with. I know confidently how to write 90000 words.

But what I’m doing is more than ghostwriting misery memoir.

I'm helping to expose some of the inadequacies of the care system whilst telling important stories of marginalised children who would otherwise have no voice in society.