Prince Harry, Britney Spears, Barbra Streisand, Richard E Grant: in 2023, the celebrity memoir mill appears to be working overtime, with eight of this week’s top 10 UK bestsellers written from the inner circles of Hollywood and Westminster. Or rather, written by the ghostwriters hired to shadow the stars. These elusive figures have gone from “dirty little secret” to, in the case of Prince Harry’s ghostwriter JR Moehringer, earning a top co-writing spot on the book’s cover and more than $1 million in the process.
It is for that reason Kevin Anderson – director of Kevin Anderson & Associates (KAA), the ghostwriting agency driving some of the world’s biggest A-list titles – has recently expanded to the UK. Responsible for memoirs from Gwyneth Paltrow, Joe Biden and Rafael Nadal – all of which made it onto The New York Times bestseller list – a new London office is being primed to boost a business that is now churning out 500 titles a year. William Shatner, Carrie Underwood, Tiger Woods and Bernie Sanders are all KAA clients, though Anderson says KAA are unable to reveal their “most prominent and successful ones” – including an unnamed royal. “It’s very frustrating not being able to share, which is a common plight among ghosts.”
Have ghostwriters become the norm because celebrities can’t write? “Absolutely not,” says Anderson, pointing to Jennette McCurdy’s 2022 bestseller, I’m Glad My Mom Died, as an example of successful self-written memoirs. He admits this is an outlier, but maintains that “just like you don’t want to do your own dentist work or your own taxes, you go to someone who’s an expert in that. And so with these celebrities who have really powerful stories, or maybe even just a really interesting idea, they’ll go to a professional ghostwriter if they don’t have the writing skills that really can do the story or the message justice.”
However the sausage gets made, publishers are ready to cash in: “Demand for celebrity autobiographies has never been stronger from publishers, who are far smaller and more risk-averse than ever,” Anderson says. “Celebrity autobiographies always sell as they have a fan-base audience – it’s a much safer bet than a brilliant book from an unknown.”
Inevitably, the intensity of the celebrity-ghostwriter relationship means that “crisis management” is a key part of Anderson’s job. He has sent his writers to Aruba, Japan, Nigeria and all around Europe for up to six months at a time. Big names “can be very challenging”, he says. For instance, Moehringer recalled that while writing Spare, “my head was pounding, my jaw was clenched” as he found himself “shouting at Prince Harry…”.
