Some books I turn down in the first conversation. Not many, and never for lack of a story. The one I decline most often has a sound, and I’ve learned to hear it before the person has finished describing the first chapter.
The sound is: I’m a victim. I’m a victim. I’m a victim. A revenge memoir announces itself before the story does. The narrator is blameless. Everyone around the narrator is a villain. Every chapter is an appeal to pity, and the pity is meant to arrive as justice. It’s a courtroom where the author is the plaintiff, the witness, and the judge, and no reader wants a seat in that room.
What is a revenge memoir?
A book whose purpose is to settle a score in print. The former spouse, the business partner, the boss, the family member, the institution. The author has been wronged, often truly, and wants the world to know who did it. The material can be dramatic. The wrong can be real. None of that makes it a book, because a book needs a narrator the reader can trust, and a narrator who was never wrong isn’t one.
You can spot it in the first hour. The story has no turns the narrator caused. Every bad outcome was done to them. Every good decision was theirs. When I ask what they would have done differently, the answer is nothing, and that answer is the diagnosis.
Why does a blameless narrator fail on the page?
Because readers don’t believe a person who never made a mistake, and they stop trusting the book the moment they notice. The endless appeal to pity that feels like justice to the author reads as special pleading to everyone else. A stranger picks up the book, meets a narrator with no flaws and a cast of monsters, and puts it down, because life doesn’t look like that and the reader knows it.
A good memoir has a narrator who was wrong sometimes. That’s what makes the rest believable. When the author admits the decision that made things worse, the reader relaxes, because now the account can be trusted. The revenge memoir refuses that admission, and refuses the reader’s trust with it.
Why is a book that villainizes real people a legal risk?
Because it names real people and makes them villains, and that exposure belongs to the author. It can also reach the writer. A writer who helps craft a defamatory book isn’t automatically a bystander in the eyes of the law, whatever the contract says about work for hire. That’s one more reason I won’t take the work, however good the story sounds.
The clearest one came from a man who’d just gotten out of prison. He was furious at the people who put him there: the cops, the guards, the warden. He wanted a book that dug up every piece of dirt on all of them and printed it, and it was going to be negative from the first page to the last. I said no. He offered more money, and I still said no. I told him the book would get him sued and into all kinds of other trouble.
I raise the legal exposure in every memoir project, revenge or not, because real people appear in every life story and the author rarely thinks about what those people will do when they read it. With a revenge memoir the exposure is the point of the book, and no amount of careful writing removes it. The memoir ghostwriting material on this site covers how I handle real people in ordinary memoirs. The revenge memoir is the case where handling isn’t enough.
Revenge memoirs aren’t the only name-naming books I’ve declined. A retired FBI informant once wanted help with a book that named names from his time informing on the mafia, and the offer would’ve been the biggest of my career. I turned it down. He promised he’d keep me confidential. I told him, dude, you’re naming names of people you were supposed to keep confidential, and you expect me to trust you?
I kind of like to be breathing. Some exposure no contract clause can cover, and I’d tell any writer tempted by a big offer to think about who ends up holding that risk.
What does Richard Lowe say when someone asks for a revenge memoir?
What I’m hearing, plainly, and why the book they’re describing won’t do what they want.
Most people who bring me a revenge memoir want vindication. They want the world to agree that they were wronged. A book of grievances doesn’t deliver that. It delivers a lawsuit, or silence, or both, and the author ends up worse off than before they wrote it.
That conversation is uncomfortable and I have it anyway, because the alternative is taking the money and writing a book that damages the client. A ghostwriter who says yes to everything is selling manuscripts. The first hour exists to find out which book is on the table, and sometimes the answer is that the book on the table shouldn’t be written.
What sometimes happens next
The real book is underneath the grievance. When the person can step back far enough to see their own part in the story, a different book appears: how they survived, what they learned, what they’d tell someone standing where they stood. That book has a narrator readers believe, because the narrator was there, made choices, and is honest about them.
It’s a better book by every measure. It reaches readers who need it instead of readers who already agree. It doesn’t name and shame, so it doesn’t expose anyone. And it does the thing the author wanted all along, to be understood, in a way the revenge memoir never could. I’ll write that book. The case studies include memoirs that started as something angrier.
Why should a ghostwriter decline a revenge memoir?
After 54+ ghostwritten books, some of the projects I’m proudest of are ones I declined. Saying no in the first hour costs me a fee and saves a client from a book that would have damaged them, and it keeps the writer out of a courtroom. Writers who take every job because the deposit clears are doing their clients harm, and it’s a lazy way to run a practice. Saying no when the book shouldn’t exist is part of how a practice stays honest.
By early 2024 I’d interviewed about 500 people who wanted a book ghostwritten, and I’d written 49. That tells you how often I say no. I went freelance partly so I could say no. I choose my clients, and I’m never in a position where I have to accept somebody. I once turned down a big contract because the man was a jerk. He was horrible.
The guide to ghostwriting describes what the first conversation has to settle. Whether the book should exist is the first item on that list, and it’s the one most writers skip.
I’m choosy about clients for another reason. I finished two big projects that both turned chaotic at the end, and I realized how much chaos affects me. When we’re going through a chapter together and trying to figure the hell out of it, I’m fine. Chaos that starts affecting me personally is different, and the kind that made me anxious came from article projects with several stakeholders who all had to approve. So now I choose book clients who are sane and trustworthy.
The courtroom
I keep the courtroom image because the revenge memoir builds one and then locks the reader inside it.
Plaintiff, witness, judge, all the same person, and the verdict decided before the trial begins. Nobody sits through that willingly. The memoir readers stay for is the one where the narrator takes the stand as a witness, tells the truth including the parts that hurt, and lets the reader reach the verdict.
That’s the difference between a grievance and a story. A grievance demands that the reader agree before they’ve heard the evidence, and readers resent being told what to conclude. A story lays out what happened, including the author’s own mistakes, and trusts the reader to reach the verdict on their own.
If you’re carrying a story with an enemy in it, bring it to the first conversation anyway. Sometimes the sound is there and I’ll say so. More often the real book is underneath, and finding it’s what the Book Discovery Intensive is for: one engagement to learn what your book is, whether it can do what you want, and whether I’m the person to write it. Send me a message on LinkedIn if you want to talk it through. Part of The Memoir Hub.
Losing the fee costs a lot less than writing a book that ends with my client in a deposition. So my advice to anyone who brings me a revenge memoir is to tell the truth about what happened, your own part included, and let the reader decide who was wrong.
