In the early 2000s, J.R. Moehringer was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who had just published his own memoir, The Tender Bar.
Andre Agassi was nearing the end of a tennis career that had taken him to the top of the sport and nearly destroyed him along the way. He wanted to write a memoir, but not the sanitized kind athletes usually produce. More on the celebrity book process. He wanted the real version, the one that included hating tennis, the abusive father, the drug use, the self-destruction.
Open is my favorite answer to anyone who asks what a ghostwriter is for, and I’m a little jealous of how far Moehringer got to go. Athletes are a growing part of my own practice, and most of them want a memoir about what their sport taught them. Too many sports memoirs read like a press release with chapters. This one reads like a man finally telling the truth about himself, and it’s the bar I hold those books to.
Agassi read The Tender Bar and recognized something in Moehringer’s writing. Here was someone who understood complicated childhoods and messy truths. Agassi reached out. Moehringer turned him down. More than once.
Eventually Moehringer agreed, and what followed was among the most intensive ghostwriting collaborations on record.
Moehringer moved to Las Vegas, settling a mile from Agassi’s house, and lived there for two years. The two spent over 250 hours together in sessions that Moehringer later described as resembling psychoanalysis. Agassi opened up about his childhood, his strained relationship with his father, his internal war between his talent for tennis and his desire to escape it.
Moehringer’s approach was total immersion. As he told NPR, “When you’re writing a memoir the trick, I think, is to treat yourself as a character … to distance yourself from yourself. You write about yourself in the first person, but you think about yourself in the third person.” He also had the advantage of direct access. “I had the wonderful perk of being able to call him, sit down with him, every time I came to something and didn’t know what it looked like or smelled like.”
I can’t move down the street from my clients, and almost nobody in this business can. What I can do is record every conversation, in Zoom for remote interviews and on a tablet when we’re in the same room, and tell the client up front that I’m doing it. Those recordings are my version of Moehringer’s phone call: the client’s real words, in their real rhythm, whenever I need them.
The result was Open: An Autobiography, published in 2009. It became a global bestseller and is still widely considered among the greatest ghostwritten books ever produced. Critics praised it for its raw honesty. Fans were stunned to learn that a world-famous athlete had spent most of his career despising the sport that made him famous.
The book worked because Agassi was willing to go where most memoir subjects refuse to go.
He admitted to drug use. He admitted to hating tennis since childhood. He admitted the “Image Is Everything” persona was exactly that, a persona. And Moehringer had the skill to shape those admissions into something that read like literature instead of confession.
The father material is what I’d study hardest.
Agassi describes a man who hurt him, and the book still reads like an account and never like a score being settled. I won’t write revenge memoirs. I decline them outright, and every prospect who wanted one walked away. A reader can smell a grudge from the first chapter, and once they do, they stop believing the author.
What happened after publication tells you something about the nature of ghostwriting. Moehringer had insisted his name not appear on the cover. “The midwife doesn’t go home with the baby,” he told the New York Times. “It’s Andre’s memoir, not our memoir.” But when Agassi appeared on a late-night talk show and the host praised the writing, Moehringer found himself yelling at the television. “Say my name. Say my fucking name.” He regretted the outburst almost immediately, calling it a lesson in his own creeping narcissism.
It drove him back to writing his own books and away from ghostwriting, at least for a while.
I understand the sting, and I don’t blame him for yelling at a television. He still had it right the first time. The book belongs to the person who lived it, and a ghostwriter who can’t make peace with that should be writing under their own name.
That pull didn’t last. Agassi later recommended Moehringer to Nike founder Phil Knight, leading to Shoe Dog in 2016. After that came Spare, Prince Harry’s memoir. That became the fastest-selling nonfiction book in UK history. In each case, Moehringer brought the same method: total immersion, unflinching honesty, and the discipline to disappear behind someone else’s voice.
Disappearing into a voice is the part of this work I care about most. A memoir client of mine read her first chapter and started crying, then told me I’d caught her perfectly, exactly what she wanted. The second chapter got the same reaction. That’s the review that matters in this business, because it comes from the one reader who knows whether the voice is right.
The Agassi collaboration set the template. It proved that a ghostwritten memoir could be taken seriously as literature. It proved that honesty sells better than polish. And it proved that a ghostwriter’s job is pulling the client’s own words out of them. I’d put Open in the hands of every celebrity who thinks a memoir is a publicity tool, and every new one that comes out polished to the point of saying nothing is a cop-out.
Where do the facts about Open come from?
- Agassi, Andre. Open: An Autobiography. Knopf, 2009.
- Moehringer, J.R. “Notes from Prince Harry’s Ghostwriter.” For more, see why successful people need memoirs. The New Yorker, May 15, 2023.
- NPR Fresh Air. Interview with Andre Agassi on Open. 2012.
- Hayes, David. “Who Wrote the Best Ghostwritten Book?” davidhayes.ca, 2021.
- Deahl, Rachel. “J.R. Moehringer.” Publisher’s Weekly, November 2021.
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