When James Fox finished the draft of Life, he didn’t mail it to Keith Richards. He sat down and read it to him, out loud, page after page. Richards listened and stopped him whenever a line didn’t sound like something he’d say. Then they fixed it.
That scene is the job of a memoir collaborator. The book has to pass the subject’s ear.
Most readers never see that part. They see a famous name on the cover, sometimes a second name in smaller type, and a voice that sounds like the person they’ve watched on stage or on the news for years. How that voice got onto the page is a story of its own, and the paper trail on the best-known books is good enough now to tell it.
How were famous memoirs written?
With time, access and a professional who listened for a living. The details differ from book to book, and the pattern doesn’t. Every one of the books below took months or years of conversation, a writer who could get the subject talking and keep him talking, and a subject who stayed involved until the draft sounded right.
Nobody on this list handed over a box of notes and walked away.
How did James Fox write Life with Keith Richards?
Fox first interviewed Richards in 1973, for a magazine, and the two stayed friends for decades. When the book deal came together in 2007, Fox already knew the voice. He still spent years on interviews. The sessions ran about two hours each, organized by subject, with a lapel microphone clipped on because Richards always had music playing in the room.
Fox talked to the people around Richards too. Marianne Faithfull, Ronnie Spector, his son Marlon and the saxophonist Bobby Keys all tell parts of the story in their own words.
Then came the reading.
Richards edited by ear, catching anything that didn’t sound like him, and the finished book carries Fox’s name right on the cover. It debuted at number one on the New York Times list, won the Norman Mailer Prize for biography and sold more than a million copies in its first year.
Nobody thinks less of Richards for the second name.
A memoir collaborator’s real test isn’t the prose. It’s whether the subject hears the draft and says, “That’s me.”Share on X
Andre Agassi and J.R. Moehringer: the writer who wanted no credit
Agassi picked his writer by reading. Moehringer, a Pulitzer Prize winner, had just published his own memoir, The Tender Bar, and Agassi decided that was the voice he wanted helping him tell his story. Moehringer spent long stretches with him, getting the real version: the father who fired a ball machine at him, the hatred of tennis, the drug use and the lie about the failed test.
When it came time for the cover, Agassi offered to share it. Moehringer said no. The story was Agassi’s, he said, and the book should carry one name. Open came out in 2009 under Agassi’s name alone, hit number one and changed what readers expected from a sports memoir. Moehringer’s role became public afterward, and the book’s reputation rose. He went on to work on Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog and Prince Harry’s Spare. My piece on Moehringer and Agassi goes deeper into that partnership.
Donald Trump and Tony Schwartz: eighteen months in the room
Tony Schwartz was a magazine journalist when he agreed to write The Art of the Deal. He got the voice by spending about eighteen months around Trump, listening in on phone calls and sitting in on meetings. The book opens with a week of those calls and meetings, reported almost minute by minute. That’s how Schwartz solved the problem of showing a reader how his subject worked.
Both names went on the cover.
Random House published it in 1987, and it spent thirteen weeks at number one. Whatever anyone thinks of the subject, the method is a textbook case of a collaborator earning a voice through presence. I’ve written separately about what that book did for Trump’s public image.
Sam Walton and John Huey: access nobody else had
Sam Walton almost never sat for long interviews. In 1989 a Fortune senior editor named John Huey landed one. That access turned into the book. Huey wrote Sam Walton: Made in America with him, and Doubleday published it in 1992, shortly after Walton died. Huey later became editor-in-chief of Time Inc.
That’s a quiet lesson about collaboration. Trust comes first. Walton talked to Huey because he already knew how Huey would handle what he said.
John F. Kennedy and Ted Sorensen: the Pulitzer question
Profiles in Courage won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, and people have argued about its authorship ever since. Kennedy chose the eight senators, shaped the argument and revised the drafts. His aide Ted Sorensen wrote in his 2008 memoir that he drafted most of the chapters, and a Georgetown professor, Jules Davids, did much of the research.
The book’s own preface thanks both of them. The arrangement was there in print from the start, and the book is still in print seventy years later. I took up the larger question in Isn’t using a ghostwriter cheating?
Who writes military memoirs with generals and sergeants major?
Military memoirs follow the same pattern with one extra requirement. The collaborator has to understand the world, or the subject spends half the interviews explaining what a battalion is.
General Norman Schwarzkopf wrote It Doesn’t Take a Hero with Peter Petre, a Fortune editor. General Tommy Franks worked with Malcolm McConnell, a former Foreign Service officer and Army enlistee who’d written about two dozen books, many on military subjects. William Bainbridge, the fifth Sergeant Major of the Army, wrote Top Sergeant with Dan Cragg, a retired sergeant major and author. Jack Tilley, the twelfth, wrote Soldier for Life with Dan Elder, a retired command sergeant major who founded the NCO Historical Society.
Then there’s the most unusual pairing on the shelf. Joseph Galloway was a twenty-four-year-old UPI reporter at Landing Zone X-Ray in November 1965, fighting alongside Hal Moore’s battalion with a rifle. Twenty-seven years later the two of them wrote We Were Soldiers Once… and Young. The collaborator didn’t have to imagine the battle. He’d been in it.
For Medal of Honor recipient Bennie Adkins, the journalist Katie Lamar Jackson built A Tiger among Us from his oral history and interviews with five other survivors of Camp A Shau. The book got written while he could still tell it. He died two years after it came out.
What about business founders and family companies?
Same method, different room. Harvard Business School Press approached Leon Gorman, L.L. Bean’s grandson, about a decade before his book came out and paired him with a professional writer, Kent Lineback. Bill Marriott Jr. wrote The Spirit to Serve with Kathi Ann Brown, whose firm produces corporate histories and executive memoirs. Companies like Tabasco and Steinway went another route and opened their archives to historians. My page on family business history books covers those choices.
How does a ghostwriter capture someone’s voice?
The way these collaborators did. Lots of interviews, all of them recorded, with the same subject approached from different directions. I record every session, in Zoom for remote clients and on a tablet in person, and I ask about the same events more than once in different ways. People misremember, blend two events into one or shrink something that mattered. Asking again from another angle is how you get to what happened.
I also deliver chapter by chapter. That’s my version of Fox’s reading aloud. A client reads each chapter as it’s finished and tells me where it doesn’t sound like them. One client cried reading her first chapter and said I’d caught her perfectly. That’s the reaction you’re working toward, and you only get it by listening far more than you write.
Writing in someone’s voice means becoming them for a while. The famous collaborators all did it the same way, with their subjects talking and the tape running.
What should you expect from a memoir collaborator?
Honest questions. The reason Open works is that Agassi let Moehringer have all of it, the parts that hurt and the parts that embarrassed him. Readers want the ups and downs and how you came back from them. A sanitized arc reads like a press release, and nobody finishes a press release.
So I probe for the failures on purpose. At the kickoff meeting I tell every client never to tell me anything they don’t want in the book, because months later I won’t remember which stories were private. That one rule saves a lot of grief on both sides.
When the material gets painful, we come at it over several sessions, and I’ll offer to leave it out. Almost every client who hears that offer insists it goes in. Clients cry in interviews all the time, and I tell them the emotion is part of the book, because it is.
You should also expect to stay involved. Kennedy revised his drafts. Richards listened to every page. The collaborator does the writing, and you do the deciding.
Does the collaborator’s name go on the cover?
Sometimes.
Fox, Schwartz, Huey, Petre and Galloway are all on their covers. Moehringer and Sorensen weren’t. There’s no single rule, and both choices are honest when the substance belongs to the subject. The decision belongs to the author. I’ve laid out how that works in Do ghostwriters get credit? and how a credited partnership differs in co-author versus ghostwriter.
The ear test
Every book on this list passed the same test before it went to print. The person whose name was on it heard it, read it or had it read to them, and said yes, that’s me. If you’re thinking about telling your own story, that’s the standard to hold any collaborator to.
The Ghostwriting Hub walks through the whole process, from the first call to the finished book. If you’ve got a life worth writing down and want a professional to help you get it on the page, my memoir ghostwriting service starts with a conversation.
Keith Richards had his book read to him before it went to print. Yours deserves the same.
