Seeing a Ghost

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/05/15/j-r-moehringer-ghostwriter-prince-harry-memoir-spare

("Notes from Prince Harry's Ghostwriter")

It is now 4:47 AM and the bedroom is dark, apart from the light coming from this phone. My wife is asleep next to me, as is the print version of this week's New Yorker. 

I have just stumbled onto Mr. Moehringer's piece online while still half asleep. It was as a thousand suns shining. What glorious writing, each word seeming to send me hurtling towards the next. This is a ghostwriter in absolutely no need of a ghostwriter.

His ability to sublimate ego, to seek not notoriety for self but clarity for another, is the very opposite of my modus operandi. A person comfortable with people not knowing what he accomplished. What an odd thought.

Yes, there is conflict in the centerpiece of this story being the person hiding behind the curtain. But that makes this even a little more entertaining.

My thanks to Mr. Moehringer for fully waking me at such an early hour. But I dare not type so furiously into my phone. It might awaken my wife. Or worse, my feeling that if given the chance to ghostwrite my life story, Mr. Moehringer would tell me to scrap the whole thing and start a wholly new draft.