Natalie Beach´s tell-all about the controversial influencer wasn´t the first case of a ghost exposing their subject, following Julian Assange and Donald TrumpThirty years after ghostwriting Donald Trump´s The Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz described the experience as like putting lipstick on a pig. He felt a `deep sense of remorse` at helping bring the man who would become president gain wider attention. Andrew O´Hagan famously detailed the extraordinary details of ghosting Julian Assange´s memoir, including watching the WikiLeaks founder eat jam pudding with his hands, before the latter backed out of a £600,000 book deal. This week, the writer Natalie Beach joined the grand tradition of ghostwriters speaking out about their subjects, with a deeply intimate essay in the Cut laying out how she used to ghost everything for her former friend and controversial `influencer` Caroline Calloway: from Instagram captions to the aborted book that once attracted a $375,000 (£300,000) publishing deal, until their relationship broke down irretrievably.Beach´s account says that after the pair put the book proposal together, the influencer felt unable to write it. Beach says she `bought us time with the publishers by writing a quarter of the manuscript by myself`. Continue reading...
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