Efrén Ordóñez Garza

Tomorrow on the Page Think on Me

The most haunting scene in any book I’ve read opens with the narrator telling the reader that no one ever expects to find themselves holding a dead body at any moment in their lives. In early nineties Madrid, a man visits a woman’s apartment to have dinner, assuming she will later invite him to tousle the sheets of her marital bed. Her name is Marta Téllez. The table is set for two that night, but Eugenio, her two-year-old son, senses the eeriness and stands guard for his father. The intruder picks up on the boy’s intention when he sees him dozing off in the living room, fighting to stay awake. When the kid finally loses the battle, Marta takes him to his crib, then comes back and escorts her darling to the bedroom. The lovers kiss and grope their bodies until a half-dressed Marta notices an unrecognizable pain inside her body. She stops the prelude, apologizes, turns away on her side of the bed, and asks the man not to touch her, not move her an inch. She feels bad for him, in disregard of her agony, even though they are not yet formal lovers. This night is supposed to be the first one together, on their third secret rendezvous. The man stays put. There is such a detachment from him, that after a timorous offer to help, to bring her a glass of water or call a doctor followed by her refusal, he just sits on the husband’s side of the bed, turns on the television and tunes into a black and white movie. His kindness to Marta goes as far as to press the mute button to let her suffer in peace. Indifferent to her pain, he tries to remember the title of the movie starring Fred MacMurray. Meanwhile, she hushes her death rales. To make it worse—for him, of course—the kid wakes up, walks into the bedroom, and sees his mother’s uncovered back, undone bra, lying next to who he knows–but can’t articulate–is the usurper of his father’s bed. The man takes Eugenio to his bedroom, sees him to his cradle, and commands him to go to sleep. He notices the crib mobile. It is made of war planes identical to the one from his childhood and suddenly, out of nowhere, or perhaps from the deepest corner of the unconscious, a line from Shakespeare comes to him: “Tomorrow in the battle think on me.” Soon, the kid’s back asleep. He returns to the bedroom to continue with the charade of his preoccupation. Marta keeps apologizing for her own pain, for the discomfort it might cause the man, who asks if it would be better to call her husband. “No,” she replies, “that’s crazy, he’d kill me.” Then: “Please hold me, hold me, hold me tight.” He does and they lay in bed. The man feels her faint movements, her breathing. First, she mumbles something incomprehensible, then the words “Oh, dear god, my boy,” a weak but abrupt tremor, followed by total stillness. He continues to hold her until he realizes he is holding a cadaver. At that moment he already knows, but mumbles the questions: “Marta, can you hear me?” But Marta Téllez lies dead in the arms of a shadow. Tomorrow in the battle think on me, and fall thy edgeless sword: despair, and die.

I read Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me by Javier Marías in my early twenties, in a De Bolsillo paperback edition, an imprint by Random House México, and its effects still linger in my writing life. While the intricacies of infidelity and casual sex were not a mystery to me, (I had seen them unfold in countless movie plots) as a reader it was hard to articulate the depths of this climactic opening scene. It went beyond adultery. However, it had the same indecipherable potence as the words said by one of my teachers during my freshman year of high school after I confessed something about a cherubic love interest of mine: “There is an enormous difference between young and adult love, dear, and you’ll understand it someday.” It took me more than twenty years to digest the sentence. Marta and the stranger were moved by more than lust, or the rush of discovering the aroma of foreign skin: it was the weight of their context, the misery of adult unfulfillment, the hollowness of years gone by. It was not until the third or fourth reread of the book when I understood the bleakness of the space and moment they were inhabiting in each other’s lives and those of others close to them. Their affair would’ve existed in secrecy, in a bedroom belonging also to someone else, a person who would probably never know about their tryst. The lingering energy of that encounter haunts me, its stench, the staleness of the ghost.

It takes the never lover a few more seconds to digest what just happened, but when it lands, he rolls Marta back to the other side of the bed. He could put her clothes back on, he could call a doctor—but that wouldn’t change the fact that she’s already dead, he thinks—maybe call a neighbor, but since he’s Marta’s paramour that would give her away. The man looks around and sees the husband’s pants still on a chair, a picture with her on the nightstand. He’s on his side of the bed, where that man should’ve been for this death. It’s obvious he can’t stay but wants to find a way to leave “gracefully.” He goes back to the living room, then to the kitchen, and finds the number of the hotel in London stuck on a post-it next to the phone. Someone at the desk in what was surely a dark night as well over there tells him that there are no guests under the name Eduardo Deán. Only a few seconds go by after he hang up, but time goes by slowly in this apartment where a kid sleeps while his mother lies dead, and a stranger stands still in the middle of their kitchen. A call breaks the silence. The answering machine picks up. A man who is not Eduardo, in an aggressive tone, scolds the dead woman for not telling him that she’d be by herself on this particular night. “After the night I had I could’ve used an afterhours romp,” he tells her. A second lover, or perhaps the main one, or one out of many. In any case, this usurper in the kitchen who will never get to become one of the official lovers is not as important as he initially had thought. He is filling in for a lover who was filling in for an absent husband. He feels unimportant now. The rest of the messages play after: a woman who knows about this night, about him, and wishes Marta good luck and urges her to call her the day after—although she could not know that there will be no day after for her—; then an older man with a formal tone who is just “checking in” and mocks Eduardo. The stand-in lover weaves different narratives to explain Marta’s life to himself: her motives, the discontent, the identities of the callers. That woman from the message knows Marta’s plan. The man takes endless minutes to decide what to do, playing all sorts of scenarios in his head, creating stories for everyone involved and the way they’d react. In the end, he decides to leave the apartment without letting anyone know about the death of Marta Téllez. “Oh, dear god, my boy.” He remembers Eugenio. Even though someone would come in at some point, he can’t let her boy starve. He also must do something about the tape revealing Marta’s night with him. Up until that call, he thought he was invisible, that no one could know about his presence in the apartment. He takes the tape from the answering machine. After he puts it in his pocket, he fixes a plate with food for the kid, pours a glass with enough orange juice, enough for a couple of days, and sets it on the table, then leaves the apartment.

The first blow to the reader is not the woman’s death—the usurper didn’t kill her— nor the adultery, but that of a person as an intruder in someone else’s life. I was haunted by the ease with which this man laid on the husband’s side of the bed, probably cuddled inside his cleft, studied the personal things scattered around his space because no one was expecting him, not even Marta, and felt somewhat comfortable in the middle of a stranger’s intimacy. The way in which he acknowledges that Eugenio tried to stay awake because, even at his age, he knew that the man was violating his family’s kingdom felt harrowing. The kid’s impotence disturbed me. I went back to this chapters to write this essay because the narrator talks about how Marta Téllez was not his life, as if he was just jumping in and out, as if he had to take himself out of his life’s timeline, exist as someone else, and get back. Later in the book, this man talks about how the only tie left between them was and would be her memory because “we have no relationship with the dead other than their presence in our heads.” He goes on to reflect on the verbs to haunt in English, and the French hanter, and how they both can be traced back to Anglo-Saxon and old French roots that mean to dwell, to lodge, and to inhabit. Marta was going to haunt him. To inhabit him. Or his head at least. This made me think that his presence on the night of her death, its residue, was also going to haunt her apartment and the heads of those who knew her. A two-way street. Family would come in, find her, bury her, mourn her, modify their lives without Marta in them. They would think about her rattles, her last seconds alive, paint a picture in their heads, without including him, this shadow or “Horla” above her.

 

A few days ago, I was flipping through the most recent book I’ve published. It’s not a book authored by me, of course. The days prior, I had been looking at Instagram posts and stories from people who had bought this memoir, videos from a couple of presentations in famous bookstores, and media interviews with the “author.” It took some time to have it in my hands because it’s not sold in the United States, so I waited until my wife brought a copy back from Mexico City. The book sat on the coffee table for days. We live in a one-bedroom apartment, and one can see the coffee table from almost every angle. Finally, after writing the first paragraphs of this essay, musing about one of the books that have shaped my writing life, set in the city that has felt more like home than any other, I decided to take my time, allow myself to feel its pages, run my fingers over the words written by me but approved by another man, close it, caress its spine, open it, and read the bio on the right flap. I went through this torture just to come up with a set of ideas for this text. I skimmed over the pages, the titles of each chapter, the ludic changes in typography that I had proposed to the editor—which she loved—the jumps between paragraphs to wrap a story, the many words, expressions, and twists on its sentences. They were all mine. The stories, characters, setting and most ideas were the author’s—even though some of the arguments and references were brought up by me during our video meetings and used in the book—but all those were dispersed along the hours of conversations taped and stored in a Zoom downloads folder. My name was nowhere to be found on the copyright page. My name was not shuffled in the Acknowledgements included in the last few pages. My name was not there because it wasn’t supposed to because for practical purposes, I was no one. For its readers, I am forever a ghost on the page. The invisibility had been implied, part of the job, but this book has affected me more than others because it made me feel proud. Feeling like “no one,” made me think of another haunting element about the novel. It has to do with the irrelevance of the narrator in the world. As he tells the story of others, he constantly reminds the reader about his nothingness. He keeps repeating that he is Nadie, No One, Nobody, Zero to the Zero Power. The real author, Javier Marías, carefully writes it in the interstices of his pages. The narrator’s name is Víctor Francés and he works as a TV-series ghostwriter. He keeps coming back to this in several sentences throughout the book, in different situations, in clear connection to his non-presence in the scripts he writes. “I am no one,” he insists. He exists in the world but at the same time feels that he is irrelevant, whether because he spends pages on end spying on someone, following people, stalking, being a shadow in someone else’s life. Or because he is just a ghost in the page. He is not an omniscient narrator: he is there, watching, conjecturing as an invisible insignificant entity. That is how I imagine one is supposed to feel as a ghost. And if you are Nadie, you can’t be a living organism, you’re it. A ghostwriter is no one. Since they would never be seen, nor named, credited, or acknowledged. He narrates the afterlife of Marta Tellez, but he is not a third person narrator, he is ghostwriting it, he’s taking the place of her.

My first ghostwriting job came in 2015. Got a call from an editor at the Mexican branch of a multinational conglomerate publishing company who asked if I would be open to writing for them. At the time, the connection meant a step forward in my professional writing life. It is strange how the books we read plant the seeds of what our writing lives will become in regard to obsessions, themes, motifs, use of language, and the interaction with literature. As I reread Javier Marías’ novel over the past weeks, I couldn’t help but to imagine that the idea of working as a ghostwriter laid dormant, waiting for the opportunity to say yes. But the thought had also been planted by another book. In Bonsái, the micro-novel or “bonsai-novel” written by Alejandro Zambra—which I typed on my computer for mere confirmation after reading in an interview that it was just thirty-seven pages long in a Word document—Julio, the protagonist and anguishing literature student, becomes a different kind of ghostwriter. He is contacted by Gazmuri, a famous Chilean writer who writes by hand and wants his latest novel digitized. They meet and things go well, but, soon after, Gazmuri decides on someone else who will help him for less money. Julio then pretends to transcribe the book, taking the basic plot the famous writer gave him in their only meeting, but writes it first by hand—like he would’ve done—then types it on a computer. He is not a ghost-writer but pretends he is writing a book by someone else, a writer he has read extensively and tries to imitate him. It became clear to me that Zambra and Julio and Gazmuri played a part in my decision to take the job offered by the multinational publishing house. Or perhaps I would’ve taken it regardless, but one must wonder. In any case, even though I had some recognition with my own writing, it wasn’t paying the bills and I wanted to take the next step as a professional writer, which meant having a relationship with a major publishing house. As I understood it, writers get by with their writing even when those pages are meant to be signed by someone else or by no one at all. That is the skill. Back then, the editors wanted someone to write a full book for a famous influencer. As it happens now in the non-literary publishing world, they offered a book deal to someone with an audience of hundreds of thousands of followers (today, that person has a few million souls awaiting to like and share his “witticisms”), since this guarantees a certain number of copies will sell according to their sales projection software. These people rarely miss the mark. Barring a surprise here and there, they have a clear idea of how many books will be sold, regardless of content. The writer is not important because whatever they print will be devoured by the author’s faithful, which reminds me of that cliché anecdote included in screenwriting books in which producer suggests cutting costs by making a movie without the screenwriter. The editor wanted to produce a book about flirting, a guide for men and women to improve their dating game, and these were the early days of Tinder, which made it fun for me since I was a devout user. First, they asked for a sample chapter. I wrote it in a couple of days and after its approval, they gave me a table of contents previously authorized by the “author,” a deadline, and their budget for my services. My job was to sit through hundreds of videos—not necessarily on the topics of love, sex, and dating—and to absorb his kind of humor, tics, fillers, and pop culture references. There would be no formal meeting with him, and he had to approve the final draft after eight weeks. It had taken me eighteen months to write a short novel of my own, but I had to write this book in just under two.

Since the book’s tone was supposed to be as light as it could be, the research experience was the same. This phase consisted of reading about flirting and dating advice from popular magazines and websites: Cosmopolitan, GQ, Men’s Health, Buzzfeed. I also spent some time in bookstores picking up guides on many things, authored by a myriad of people from different backgrounds. These books shared a structure and I had to find it.

Writing the book meant money, the opportunity to make something that would reach readers, no matter how vacuous the topic. Nonetheless, I had a conscience. I stayed away from the misogynous, racist jokes, and focused on the absurdity of the dating world without losing sight of his audience. But I needed something else, stories, anecdotes to make it “personal.” My mission was to take this man’s place, to usurp, to be an intruder in his book—or was it mine?—to become a ghost that would never be seen. As I was working on it, I pulled out memories from my own life. The book has a few personal stories, whether mine or from my friends, about us declaring our teenage love, pseudo-romantic dinners, and the planning behind them, even the very serious advice a friend’s mother gave us on choosing a life partner. This was me being a true ghost, haunting the pages of another man’s book, inhabiting it, leaving a hint of myself. The only people that would know would be those who lived those anecdotes, and that was only if they ever had the book in their hands, and felt something, a presence.

The editors were happy with the result. The author made very few amendments and a couple of months after handing in my draft, the book was sold in every bookstore in the country. I loved seeing the bright colored cover on the New Releases table. But what made the experience surreal was when I was walking on Avenida Insurgentes in Mexico City, one of the largest in the world, framed by glass office buildings, both chain and top restaurants, stores, and seeing the book promoted on a busway stop, with the author’s augmented and picaresque face inviting readers to learn his method of flirting. Or were those my keys to success in dating?

After that first book, I was asked to write a few more about various topics, with different tones, voices, language even, all following the same steps: either follow or develop a table of contents, write a sample chapter—I was rejected by at least a couple of “authors” who did not like my audition pages—and take around two months to hand in one hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty pages of someone else’s ideas. Back then, there was no existential dilemma, it was work as a writer, it meant structuring and finishing books, loosening my fingers, exploring different topics, reading, and the strange pleasure that came with having a connection with someone famous, even it was only on the page, as if the book were the house and the ghostwriter the presence who doesn’t want to be seen, but needs to make a presence felt.

But ghosts are not only known to be invisible entities who haunt the living without being seen, often, they want—or need—to leave messages in different ways, sometimes to say a specific thing, and others, just to let everyone know that they are still in the world, even if it is as pure ectoplasm, but to not be forgotten, like Oscar Wilde’s Canterville ghost and his bloodstain, or the black mold stains in one of my favorite movies, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, directed by Osgood Perkins, or the writings on the walls in the almost perfect book written by Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House. In the same way, as a ghostwriter, I’ve been leaving these stains scattered on the page, imperceptible perhaps, but valuable for sure. They have been my desperate need to say that I am there, here, barely visible on the page, that I have ideas of my own that I’ve trying to write in my own books, unfinished books, unpublished books that no one would read.

Tomorrow in the battle think on me,

And fall thy edgeless sword. Despair and die.

Thou quiet soul, sleep thou a quiet sleep.

Víctor Francés wrote TV scripts for producers, directors, and relatives of high executives who wanted credits, or some money made via their authorship. He was detached from the people he was impersonating, and he didn’t care about getting credit of his own for his words, and, as a result, never in the book do we read about his own ideas voiced by TV actors on Spanish television. He doesn’t seem to want a connection with them. Even though I imagined a relationship with the famous individuals I wrote for, they never knew my name and some of them never read my drafts because their PR team oversaw the tedious process. I can’t say that my detachment was the same as the narrator in Marías’ novel, because there is a thrill about writing for someone who is something I am not: recognized for their work. If this has been servitude on my part, I’d rather cover the issue with a thick veil.

About a month after Marta’s death, she was still haunting Víctor’s head. She is “not part of his life,” but the memory is there. The haunting moves him to tell the story. He must get close to her to keep doing it. He arranges a meeting with Ruibérriz Torres, a friend of his who is also a ghostwriter, but a more exclusive one. He is very well connected in Madrid, knows people, and had dirt on everyone who was anyone—unlike him, who could be named No One. He’d know how to get him close. After a sloppy conversation with Ruibérriz, he dropped names, namely, Eduardo Deán, and Marta Téllez, and that is how Marta’s father came up, someone whom Ruibérriz had heard about, a retired but respectable man who was in touch with the royal house. Víctor said he wanted to meet him somehow.

A few of Ruibérriz’s jobs as a ghostwriter was to write speeches, and days later needed someone to cover for him. When reaching out to Marta’s father the job came up. The king of Spain, who is never mentioned as such, but instead as The Only One, Only the Lonely, The Lone Ranger, Only You, among others, was in search of a new ghostwriter for his speeches. Ruibérriz comes highly recommended. He agrees, with Marta’s father, to send a stand-in, an impostor, a good friend who is also a fantastic writer, named Víctor Francés. He would work with the old man and meet Only the Lonely as if he were Ruibérriz. A ghost for a ghost. After the meeting with Only You, he agrees to work at Marta’s father apartment, in his studio, for a week. It is during these days that he meets Eduardo Deán and Luisa, the sister. A month after Marta Téllez died in his arms and he left the apartment in the middle of the night, the ghost is finally sitting among the living relatives of Marta Téllez, having lunch with them, listening to their conversation without being acknowledged, without being seen, because he’s no one. He is the ghost of a ghost, someone that could be seen as less than no one, since he was supposed to write what Ruibérriz would write if Ruibérriz were to write what The Lone Ranger would say if he were to write his own speech. Nobody could meet with the author of the words he was about to type, to listen to him, to capture his tone, rhythm, intentions, to express whatever it was that man wanted to say. There’d be a relationship.

The other form of ghostwriting that I have experienced is perhaps more complicated because it involves meeting the author and forming a connection with the person. You work one-on -one, through the writing process, but the decisions or the trace that the ghost is tempted to leave between the lines will most likely be gone after that. There’s a story on the author’s side, maybe an area of expertise or a desire to say something, and not just to use the book as a marketing tool—although some of them, the entrepreneurial kind, do. They have ideas of their own, often strong opinions—and a sense of restlessness in their chest—in many cases conflicting with what the ghost might feel or think, whether that means conservative views on social issues, capitalistic obsessions, or privileged positions in life. Of course, not all of them are questionable, there are various safe topics, and some of them end up being enjoyable. We can stay away from the contentious issues and talk about nutrition, genetics, sports, an inspirational life story. Most of these authors come with a platform: Instagram, mainly, TikTok if not. If pernicious ideas or a wicked world vision– like the teachings of a guru, an uncertified diet, a pyramid scheme, or the perpetuation of hustle culture and other vices–were to stay in the author’s head, everything would be fine. They don’t have the time, nor the skill to add the book as an amplifier of their ideas. But the ghostwriter serves as a bridge, and then the existential dilemma comes to be. These tend to be eccentric characters, colorful, conflicting voices. However, this does not mean that they’re likable. Tony Schwartz regrets ghostwriting Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal. And I found my very own Trump.

I first met César in 2016. He was around my age—but seemed older—, part of a company with enormous deals across Latin America. He had a couple of niche books out before we met and wrote regularly about his business in a blog. He was writing his own words, but with the success of his business, and the growing demand for original content on his social media accounts, he had no time to spend facing the page. I met him right before the entrepreneur-partner-consultant – that he was transformed into an outlandish character stemmed out of a novel.

I watched—and maybe aided, with the books I wrote—César grow as a social media mogul, leave the company he created, and start another one. We transitioned together. His niche books turned into business and entrepreneurial, self-help books. They became more personal, lighter in tone, controversial even, tagged by some as a tool for his pyramid scheme business. Before writing the next one, he would give me a pile of books, serious books, about sales, marketing, business administration, innovation. These were written by authors who were taken seriously in the world, and César’s were a chew-down blend of chapters, which he would mark down for me. I read them all. I brainwashed myself into thinking that this was not the work for a scam artist, but valuable content disguised in the voice and shine of a business influencer.

I can’t say that I was a No One for César. Every time we would meet in his office or at one of his events, at the lowly lit bar of a high-end hotel in Mexico City, surrounded by executives and celebrities, he would put his hand on my shoulder and tell his business associates or contacts: He is the real César Marquez. I’m sure he thought that the credit would pay my rent. He’d then call me his editor—not really telling them that it was I who was typing the words—with a grin on his face that made me wildly uncomfortable. I was not the real César Marquez. I never wanted to be him, to write about what he (we) was (were) writing about. I felt a profound conflict with the ideas he (we) was (were) selling. Maybe that is why other writers don’t really want to ghostwrite, and if they do, they hide it, keep it a secret. It feels dirty to promote certain topics and to help people profit from them. Even though we worked together for a few years, there was never the level of affection. César happened. But César also went away.

During the César years, I also worked with an actress, a Mexican celebrity who contacted me to help her write her first mystery novel. It was the first time I agreed to write fiction for someone else and not words on business administration, self-help, or marketing. At the time, I had two unfinished books of my own, a pair of attempts that were taking too long. The first one was a novel for which I had collected some money—and felt guilty for not being able to rewrite a horrendous first draft— and the other one a collection of fake biographies, which I pitched for a grant as a book in the tradition of The Temple of Iconoclasts, by Rodolfo Wilcock, a book made up of fictional short biographies, and Imaginary Lives, by Marcel Schwob, a book on semi-biographical stories. I had no time to even think about them, but still accepted the job of writing another person’s novel, a book that would be finished and published—he already had a deal with another major publishing house—before mine were even dusted.

One of my first fantasies, back when I dreamt about potential idyllic lives, had me as a Stephen King character: a writer of horror novels, living in the woods on the East Coast of the United States, with an old Jeep parked outside, a short drive away from New York City. This image lived in my head long before my incursion in literature, when the question of the writer as a meandering parasite in Europe did not even exist. Before I became infected. It is hard to find when this Stephen King fantasy began, but I remember reading a Spanish translation of Salem’s Lot in my early teenage years, a hardcover edition from the seventies with yellowish pages that belonged to my father. Ben Mears, the main character, was a writer, like many of “The King of Horror’s” characters. The prospect of writing a genre novel and not an abstract literary one felt exciting. A few months later, I had ghostwritten the actress’s novel, passed it to her editors who approved it and sent it to the printers. My books were still lost in the inkwell.

There was something making me choose other people’s books before mine. A Freudian feast was behind my demeanor, and I had to figure it all out, to find what hid behind the ghostwriter’s mind, what moved them to spend all those hours, their talent, their creative fuel on someone else’s vision. I needed some solace.

 

It’s hard to find books or essays on ghostwriting. Other than manuals and how to’s, the topic is not nearly as exhausted as the typical on writing, on translation, on editing, even. It’s as if writers who ghostwrite—or have done it—don’t want to reflect on it, and the ones who do are ghosts first, writers second, and don’t face the dilemma of writing for someone else. If you were to type the search word ‘translation’ on Lithub.com, one of the most popular sites on literature, publishing, and craft, you’d find almost six hundred entries tagged. The search result with the word ‘ghostwriting’ brings up only nine posts, while ‘ghostwriter’ shows eight, although at least a couple share the tag. On the Paris Review website, ‘translation’ brings up 1,757 texts, ‘ghostwriting’ only nineteen.

Thus, while my conflict with it lies elsewhere, I have concluded that ghostwriting is seen as immoral, not just by writers of their own books, but also by readers who are oblivious of the way the industry works. After I told a few friends who exist outside the book universe about my incursion in ghostwriting, they seemed offended by the fact that some of the books they read carried the ideas of a ghost, and not those of the person on the cover. The possibility that they were following the life advice of an unknown person and not the business guru they followed on social media was scandalous. I can’t say they are wrong.

In 2004, Jennie Erdal published her first book, Ghosting: A Double Life, in the United Kingdom. This was the first book she ever published under her own name, after several others, two novels among them. In the eighties, she was hired by a prominent editor to be part of his team. He was the head of Quarter Books and, and we don’t read his name, but she names him Tiger, after his grandiose personality, but also because he is most proud of a tiger skin hanging from a wall in his office. With time, this Tiger absorbed her to become a full-time personal ghostwriter, something she did for over twenty years. She wrote books for him, articles, speeches, responded to interviews. This was never something she wanted, it happened gradually, then suddenly, in what appeared to be psychological power play, she ultimately lost. As I read her memoir, I could not help but to think if César’s personality also blanketed mine, or if the disillusionment with the writing life plus a survival instinct had me working for him on a month-to-month verbal contract.  As a memoir, she narrates parts of her life, and how her love of language from an early age directed her life, but it takes her over one hundred pages—half the book—to start reflecting on ghostwriting. Before she even starts with the part of her job that gave her the title for the book, she paints a loving picture of Tiger, his logic, the way he ran Quartet, his eccentricities and how he helped her after her husband decided to break up the marriage because he had found another woman in Australia and left her with three kids to look out for. She clearly feels a strong affection for her author, something that has never happened to me. Perhaps there is little to say about ghostwriting. Or maybe she was more interested in the platonic relationship with the man she wrote for, in the power dynamic. I can understand being the ghostwriter of someone who, albeit in a weird form, one could admire, but this was not the relationship I had with César. He was not the same type of man, even though he behaved in the same way, believing he was or is larger than life, hence cultivating eccentricities and creating a persona with the help of social media. It is harder to write for and pretend to be someone you disagree with on every level possible. The writing in this case goes beyond the act of typing and stringing ideas together.

 

After a few years of writing for others—of confusing imperson-ation—there was no time left to write for myself. I was building a career typing words that were not mine. I had become a typist, a scribe, someone who would write automatically, punching keys, spinning ideas without even questioning them anymore, consoling myself with the fact that they were paying the bills. I was by no means making a lot of money, I just had the freedom to earn it from different places. It became clear to me that ghostwriting was not writing, it was something else.

It’s devastating to write something that takes up time, mental space and pathetically excites you at times, while knowing that the author has a different name than yours. Probably one of the most pitiful feelings I’ve experienced is when, as I am writing ideas for a book, structuring thought that is supposed to be someone else’s, a sense of pride emerges. Those are not my ideas, not my voice, because even if I were to write those same things under my name, I would do it differently, wouldn’t I? I know the words, phrasing, and humor would be different. But I write jokes that are not funny to me, then promote ideas with my moral compass, and yet I feel proud of the way they are written on the page. I have never been proud of the final product, but I sometimes enjoy those moments when I am typing words, forming sentences to reach an unimportant audience, at least to me, and that is troubling. It’s easy to lose one’s identity when ghost writing: you are not the writer you want to be, and you are not the person you are writing for. You are nadie.

 

 

 

 

Efrén Ordóñez Garza is a writer, editor and translator from Monterrey, Mexico, living in Washington, DC. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from The City College New York. He is also finishing his third novel with a grant from The National Endowment for Culture and Arts in Mexico. He founded the publishing house Argonáutica (for which he translated Mark Haber’s Melville’s Beard). He has three published books: a short-story collection (Gris infierno/Gray Inferno, 2014), a children’s book (Tlacuache. Historia de una cola/Possum. A Tail’s Story, 2015) and a novel (Humo/Smoke, 2015 and 2017), that was awarded with the state’s highest honor, the Nuevo León Prize in Literature in 2014. In 2017, He received the Young Creator’s Grant from The National Endowment for Culture and Arts in Mexico, a federal level program for artists under the age of 35, which supported the writing of his second novel (El Vestido Verde (The Green Dress) forthcoming with UANL University Press in 2025).