Pretend I'm Not Here Read online

  Dedication

  For Dennis and Sasha

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue: Chameleon

  One: Moses and Me

  Two: The Man Who Knew Too Much

  Three: Loyalties

  Four: Ben

  Five: The Jewish Amy Tan

  Six: The Senator and His War

  Seven: Ghost in the Machine

  Eight: Losing My Religion

  Nine: Village People

  Ten: Giving Up the Ghost

  Eleven: Haunted

  Twelve: Learning to Vanish

  Thirteen: Torches Lit

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Chameleon

  We go through life. We shed our skins. We become ourselves.

  —Patti Smith

  In the summer of 2014, my brother called to tell me he’d just heard that our ninety-one-year-old father was being taken to a Miami emergency room by ambulance because he was having trouble breathing.

  “Find him and figure out what’s going on,” my brother said, explaining that the aide who called from the assisted living facility didn’t have any additional information. “I know you can find him faster than I can,” he repeated. “That’s what you do.”

  So I identified the hospital closest to my dad’s address and tracked down the ER nurse tending to my father. She said they were running tests on him and they would have some answers shortly.

  “Is he in pain?” I persisted.

  “He can tell you himself,” she said and handed him the phone.

  “Hello there,” I heard my dad say, with a forced cheerfulness punctuated by wheezing.

  “Dad, what’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know. Do I have a medical license?” he said, sounding more like his ornery self.

  “What are your symptoms?”

  “They’ve got me on a gurney in the hallway.”

  “Dad, your symptoms—do you have pains in your chest? Your arm?”

  “They say I was having trouble breathing . . .” He launched into a long story about how he hadn’t felt “quite right” after lunch and had sat down in the lobby when a friend came along and noticed his color wasn’t good . . . So they called over someone else to see if they agreed that he was a little pale . . .

  I interrupted, trying to get him to tell me exactly what he was experiencing.

  “Listen,” he said, “Harriet called me this morning and said there was a story in the paper about Hillary, and it mentioned you.” I didn’t know who Harriet was. I did know the story he was referring to. The Washington Post had run something about Hillary Clinton’s latest book, Hard Choices. The day before, Paul Farhi, a reporter at the paper, had contacted me for a comment. Nearly twenty years earlier, I had worked with Mrs. Clinton on her first book, It Takes a Village, when she was First Lady. The reporter wanted a quote from me that would provide context for the standard story he was probably writing—Hillary Clinton has a new book out and this time she’s given her ghost credit.

  “Did you see that story?”

  “Yes, Dad, the guy e-mailed me, and I said what I always say: ‘No comment.’ Dad, can we please get back to your health?” I tried to keep the mounting exasperation out of my voice.

  “I guess you’ll be the only one in the family who doesn’t vote for Hillary,” he said with a sniff. I realized then what my father was doing. It wasn’t that he was faking this medical emergency; he was exploiting it, holding his condition hostage. I knew how this would end; he was a lifelong Democrat, and he wanted me to promise I would vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

  “Right now, Dad, I’m worried about your health.”

  “No need to worry about me. I will be fine. It’s this country you need to worry about. Which brings me back to my original question: Who will you be voting for in the next election . . . ?”

  Even as early as high school, like Woody Allen’s Zelig character, I found myself orbiting on the periphery of people in the public eye. Maybe it’s in the genes, as I can trace a through-line back to my great-grandfather, who was a stable groom to Czar Nicholas.

  My first brush with celebrity was Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whose “five stages of grief” theory gained world renown in 1969 with the publication of her groundbreaking book On Death and Dying. One of my high school classmates was Dr. Kübler-Ross’s son, and in the mid-1970s, I hung out frequently in the Kübler-Ross home in the suburbs of Chicago. It was a big house and we didn’t go into parts of it. I knew that was because terminally ill patients stayed there sometimes. One day we went into a part of the house we didn’t usually go, a room that had a sort of teepee-shaped structure, made from what looked like giant Legos. My friend said I could sit inside the structure and see if I felt anything. I sat there and sat there, waiting for something to happen. You’d be right if you thought this was a good description for my whole high school experience.

  These were also the years when Dr. Kübler-Ross was beginning to participate in some unusual activities such as out-of-body experiences and spiritualism, but all I knew was that she was helping dying people and that seemed like a worthy cause. After graduation, when I was leaving to go to Occidental College in California, Dr. Kübler-Ross gave me an autographed copy of On Death and Dying, which she’d inscribed “To Barbara, with good wishes for your trip to California. Elisabeth K. Ross Sept. 1977.”

  My next brush with fame didn’t even involve real contact, and I wouldn’t know it until many years later. At age twenty, after my sophomore year, I transferred to UC Berkeley, leaving Occidental four months before a young Barack Obama would arrive there. I left behind some (extremely bad) poetry, which found its way into a student literary publication. I had no memory of the poetry journal, until thirty years later, when I received an e-mail from David Maraniss, whom I had known when we both worked at the Washington Post. The e-mail said he was working on a biography of Barack Obama and that during his research he had found the Spring 1981 volume of Oxy’s literary journal, Feast, which contained three of my poems along with one written by Obama. “Yours were better,” Maraniss wrote to me. And then he quoted a line from one of my poems: “Ashes sleep with ashes but people dream alone.” “Anyway,” his e-mail continued, “I would love to talk to you about Oxy, that time and place, whether you actually knew Barry or not . . .”

  I wrote back, explaining that I hadn’t crossed paths with the future president. Later, when I read Maraniss’s book, I learned that my best friend at Oxy had become close with Obama, serving as inspiration for “Regina,” a key female character in his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.

  In my early twenties, I got an amazing opportunity—to work for Bob Woodward of Watergate fame. I hadn’t thought about becoming a book researcher, but once the seed was planted, it grew with abandon. After my stint with Woodward, research jobs on additional high-profile books quickly followed, and soon enough, with a few books on my résumé, I was under the illusion that I was running with the big dogs; I was part of the game, inside the power structure. The role I played was as varied as the books I worked on: the gig with Woodward turned out to be the first stop on a long ride that would take me from researcher to book doctor, to collaborator, to ghost—a publishing insider’s taxonomy that I will flesh out later. For now I’ll just use “ghost” as shorthand to refer to my role as someone who worked behind the scenes on other people’s books. I couldn’t know it then, but before I would lay to rest my ghostwriting career I would masquerade as, among others, a U.S. senator with a “female pro
blem” (in a project that had failed to launch), a congresswoman who took on the male-dominated Congress, a second U.S. senator who had also been a presidential candidate, a tire magnate turned presidential candidate, and, most notably, a First Lady (who would later become a two-time presidential candidate) who wanted to reshape her image.

  Few occupations allow you to see how famous people act when they aren’t on the public stage. My clients were people I saw on television or read about in newspapers and magazines. I was only twenty-three years old when I began working for Woodward, and the proximity to fame and power was intoxicating. I suddenly found myself interesting to people who I thought were more interesting than I was. It slowly became clear to me that—in Washington at least—my appeal was more about who I knew than who I was.

  I was someone who was constitutionally camera-shy, both literally and figuratively, so being a ghost offered me cover. I could hide behind the celebrity of prominent people. Being offstage was a relief, but at the same time it was disappointing to realize that someone at a dinner party was talking to me because of whichever famous person I was associated with at the moment, that I was just a conduit to a Big Name. This had an eclipsing effect on me during a decade—that of my twenties—that was defining. “As a twentysomething, life is still more about potential than proof,” writes psychologist Meg Jay in her book The Defining Decade. “Those who can tell a good story about who they are and what they want leap over those who can’t.” By yielding to others’ stories, I neglected to live and to tell my own.

  Once I saw a TV profile of a woman who had received a kidney transplant, and though a lifelong vegetarian, after the transplant, she began to crave fried chicken. In the predictable tearful meeting between the donor’s family and the recipient, she learned that the deceased had loved—you guessed it—fried chicken. For me, taking on a ghosting gig was like getting that person’s kidney—or maybe their heart—transplanted into my body. I’m sure plenty of ghosts don’t feel that way. But for me, my experience was that the act of writing in the voice of others, in addition to being taken away from my own writing, meant that I was being taken away from myself. My subjects seeped beneath my skin. Their blood and marrow commingled with mine, and ultimately I found myself absorbed. Their problems became more important than mine, their dreams more alluring. Their mental stuff took up all the room in my head and my heart, pushing mine to the periphery.

  It was alarming to me when I realized my subjects’ histories had become intertwined with mine, so much so that I began to date things in my mind with their touch points instead of mine. The Gulf War, that must have been in 1991 because that’s when the senator was doing such and such . . . instead of That must have taken place in 1989 because it was the same year my mother died. My vocabulary changed, and I began to swear like a truck driver when I worked with the famously profane, legendary newspaperman Ben Bradlee. I even appropriated my clients’ mannerisms, nodding my head to show concern as though I were Hillary Clinton on a listening tour.

  After my honeymoon period of being a ghost and that first flush of adrenaline that accompanied it, I experienced a long, slow trajectory of feelings that ultimately settled into sadness and regret. I felt that I had let myself down by giving up my own voice, identity, and precious time. All along I kept reassuring myself that ghostwriting was a good training ground for what I really wanted: to write my own book and try to make it as a novelist. Someday, I told myself, thanks to the skills I acquired ghosting, I would resurrect my long dormant unpublished novel and be equipped, at long last, to turn it into a masterpiece. Studying how to calibrate and construct the voices of others would teach me how to shape and refine my own. I once confidently told my students in a creative writing class that learning to modulate, sometimes appropriate another’s voice, was useful. But even as the words were coming out of my mouth, they sounded hollow and forced. I had actually come to believe that ghostwriting was an exercise in ventriloquism and nothing much else. I learned, above nearly all else, that everyone has a story to tell, but the version they are willing or able to tell is not necessarily the story most worth telling.

  Despite how I feel about ghostwriting, the fact remains that it can be very interesting work, and it is often a lucrative profession that has kept food on the table for a lot of out-of-work journalists and aspiring novelists, myself included. But few aspire to become a ghost, and in my case it certainly wasn’t premeditated. As a child I didn’t pose my Barbie at a miniature typewriter and have her ask Ken insightful questions with a toy tape recorder running. I don’t think I even heard the word ghostwriter until a half-dozen years into my career as a Washington journalist, when, uncertain about my future, I encountered a New York literary agent who proposed I become one. The fact that anyone had any sort of an idea about my future was a relief, and the fact that this agent had a writer-related job in mind for me was exciting. It wasn’t the sort of writing that I ultimately wanted to do, but at least it was writing.

  My identity, the way I approach everything, is and always has been about being a writer. One of my earliest, sharpest memories is of writing a poem in fourth grade. We were studying poetry forms: haikus and limericks, that sort of thing. My teacher was Mrs. Baker and I loved her. She wore her pitch-black hair in a Madmen-ish bouffant updo, was always dressed in crisply tailored suits, and never raised her voice. She was the first person I can remember who thought my writing showed promise.

  I was born in Chicago, but when I was six we moved to Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, an unremarkable bedroom community ten miles north of Philadelphia, because of my dad’s job. There weren’t a lot of Jews in Jenkintown. In fact, my memory is that I was the only Jewish kid in my class. Seared into my mind’s eye is the humiliating scene of being chased home from school one day by a gang of kids yelling, “Go fly a kike.”

  I didn’t know what the word kike meant, but the mob’s tone was menacing enough that I didn’t stick around to ask questions. When I arrived home, breathless and with tears streaming down my freckled cheeks, I told my mother what had happened and she explained what the word meant. It hadn’t occurred to me up until that moment that being Jewish was a liability. This is my first memory of being branded as an outsider, a theme that has recurred throughout my life, in many ways, sometimes by choice but more often by circumstances.

  This came on the heels of Mrs. Baker assigning us to write Easter poems one afternoon. Nowadays, of course, a teacher in a public school couldn’t get away with an Easter assignment, but this was 1970 and holiday-specific activities were still standard fare. Since I was a people pleaser from the get-go, when Mrs. Baker asked for volunteers to read aloud their Easter poems, my hand shot up and in a proud but tentative voice I went first:

  It’s that time of year again

  To dye Easter eggs all different colors

  I like to dye them

  Purple, green, yellow and blue

  Even though I am a Jew.

  It makes a better story to say I read with purpose, that I had a political point to make, that this was my big Norma Rae moment. But I think I just was proud of the rhyme and wanted to show off; my poem’s ironic value was, I’m sure, totally lost on me and all my little classmates.

  Whatever was in that ten-year-old head of mine, Mrs. Baker looked horrified and my classmates giggled when I finished my recitation. She kept me after class, and, thinking I was in trouble, I felt a rush of relief wash over me when she apologized. Though this moment was long before political correctness had entered our collective consciousness, it must have been obvious to Mrs. Baker that her assignment, while well meaning, was problematic.

  After I grew up, influenced by the ways of Washington, I spun that anecdote into a lesson about the power of the pen as persuasion, editing and improving on my own life to suggest that as a precocious schoolgirl I was a master of irony. It wasn’t until I found the original document that I realized that I had superimposed my adult’s interpretation onto a child’s much more innocent motivation.
I rediscovered the actual poem upon my mother’s passing, in 1989, when I was twenty-nine. My father had asked me to go through her things and keep what I wanted, divide up the rest among my siblings, and give away the unclaimed possessions to Goodwill.

  I found folded up in her jewelry box a piece of lined notebook paper. There was my poem, in my shaky cursive, the ink faded by time. And below my words, a string of a half-dozen little Easter eggs I had drawn with pastel-colored pencils. They seemed to be dancing across the page, hopeful oval shapes filled with zigzags and stripes. This was not a polemical manifesto but rather a child’s art project. Shut up, Memory, I told myself.

  So there it is, my life in an eggshell: my desire to be a writer, my desire to please, my complicity in my own disappearance, and my meek protest against that very fact.

  One

  Moses and Me

  The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.

  —Coco Chanel

  I graduated from Berkeley with a degree in creative writing and a vague notion about wanting to pursue a career that involved writing. But before surrendering to adulthood, I spent a mostly magical summer in Italy and Greece, first attending a college buddy’s wedding in the Italian Alps and then roaming around the Greek Isles with another friend. As Labor Day approached and my funds dwindled, I booked a ticket from Athens to D.C., landing in the nation’s capital with not much more than a duffel bag of dirty clothes and a travel journal.

  I decided to head to Washington because that is where my siblings were and I didn’t have a better idea. First my sister and then my brother—both government lawyers—provided me food and shelter and helped me put together some semblance of a résumé for my job search. This wasn’t easy, given my spotty work history: babysitter, camp counselor, greeting card author (a college roommate’s father owned a greeting card company and had employed me to write sappy verses to accompany cloying animal photos), and singing-telegrams entrepreneur (another college buddy had talked me into going into business with her).