Standing at her client’s front door, Emma* rang the bell for the third time. Then she got out her mobile and dialled her number – straight to voicemail.
Fearing she’d made the two-hour journey on the wrong day or arrived at the wrong place, Emma then double checked her calendar and emails. Everything was correct. There was just one thing missing – the household name whose story she was being paid to ghostwrite.
‘It was annoying, but I’ve dealt with celebrities for years, so I know what they can be like. I just plastered on a smile and moved forward,’says Emma, who is going by a pseudonym.
Ghostwriters spend hours speaking to celebrities to find out all their secrets – and which will make it onto the pages – but it’s unlikely you’ll know who they are. If their names are revealed at all, it’s usually buried deep in the acknowledgements at the back of the book.
The opening line
Showbiz writer Emma took on her first ghostwriting gig around five years ago and admits it was quite the eye-opener.
As part of her job, her path had often crossed with Sarah*, a well-known British name, at glitzy functions. The pair got along well whenever she interviewed the star, so when the book idea was first born, it seemed like an obvious avenue for them to work together on it.
‘We’re very different people, but we bonded,’ Emma tells Metro. ‘She could always make me laugh with her one-liners and outspoken way of talking. It was fun to be around someone who was quite unapologetic about it.
‘I just liked her. She’d recognise me, even in busy rooms, and make the effort to say hello. I was also quite close with her agent at the time, so that helped.
‘There was no way Sarah had the will to write it herself,’ she adds. ‘So it was an immediate yes when I was asked to do it. I’d never ghostwritten before, but I thought it would be a fun challenge figuring out things as I went along.’
While J.R. Moehringer is said to be the highest-paid ghostwriter ever after earning a rumoured seven figures for penning Prince Harry’s memoir Spare, Emma was offered to choose from an up-front fee of just over £10,000 or be paid in royalties based on the number of copies sold. She opted for the former as she didn’t know how well it would perform, while Sarah got six figures from the deal regardless.
Through the agent, it was quickly arranged that Emma would head over to the celebrity’s home for their first official book session.
‘The plan was to run through her story chronologically,’ she explains. ‘Sarah is a natural, so didn’t need any of the prompts I’d prepared, but she’d often go off on tangents.
‘Sometimes, she’d just want to tell me gossip or moan about exes, which I knew could be legally problematic. It could be a lot and felt more like an endless therapy session at some points. As time went on, some days I had to stop myself asking her, “Why the hell did you do that?”’
Doing it for the plot
As the novelty wore off over the three-month process, Emma found herself chasing Sarah, desperate to lock in dates for more interview time, as the book publisher began to breathe down her neck about looming deadlines.
Ironically, the ghostwriter even got ghosted at certain points. ‘She was very hard to pin down,’ Emma remembers. ‘Once I travelled to her home, it was a four-hour round trip, but she wasn’t there when I arrived. She eventually texted saying I’d got the wrong day, but I looked back at our messages, and I had got the date right – she was trying to gaslight me.
‘I also had a full-time job, so sticking to the schedule was important, but Sarah had no concept of that and became very flaky. It was very much about her, it was clear she never viewed my time as important as hers. Most of the time, she wouldn’t even give an excuse; she just used to cancel or not pick up the phone.’
When they did manage to meet up, Sarah would sometimes end their sessions prematurely: ‘She’d say, “Right, I need to go now, I’ve booked a pedicure, let’s do another time” or “I’m going out to a party”.
So, Emma devised a plan to keep her subject focused. ‘I would get her chatting about some showbiz gossip, even though I knew it was legal dynamite, just to keep her in the room. Then I could sneak in something I needed to know about,’ she admits.
Sarah’s version of the truth was also something Emma soon got used to. ‘I had to take stuff with a pinch of salt, because she’d tell me things and then I would speak to friends and family, to get a bit of background, and they would say it wasn’t true.
‘Even something as simple as where she was at a really important moment of her life, someone would later tell me she’d got it completely wrong. It was a lot of fact checking.’
Character development
Despite her frustrations, Emma admits that she couldn’t help but warm to Sarah.
‘I saw a different side to her while spending so many hours together, sometimes the guards came completely down and I saw glimpses of the person behind the headlines,’ she explains.
‘Yes, her world was very different from mine, but there was a normal woman inside it all. As I listened to her full story, I began to understand why she behaved the way she did.’
Emma continues: ‘She would also do sweet things like buy my coffee, or drop me back to the train station after we’d finished speaking. Towards the end, it was more like I was meeting a friend for a catch-up, as we’d discuss TV shows we’re watching and she asked questions about my life as well. She seemed to genuinely care.’
The final chapter
However, much to Emma’s surprise, once the book was finished, so was their ‘friendship’.
‘It was odd going from spending so much time together to not speaking, because it consumed my life. I did try to message Sarah after the book came to an end, but it said this number no longer exists,’ she adds.
‘I knew she changes her number a lot; so assumed it wasn’t personal, but she didn’t make the effort to give me the new one. I was like, “Okay, I guess we won’t stay in touch.”
‘But if I saw her out, it’d be nice to catch up.’
So what did Sarah think of the finished version, which went on to sell a reported 150,000 copies?
‘She didn’t ever sit down to read it with me,’ admits Emma. ‘She doesn’t have the attention span, so I can’t say if she was happy with it… Her agent was though!’
Why we love celeb books
Metro’s Senior Features Writer Josie Copson is part of a small London book club which reads only one genre – here she explains why we just can’t resist a celebrity autobiography.
Since 2017, I’ve been part of a book club that exclusively reads the autobiographies of famous people. That statement can often make people giggle, as perhaps they aren’t the most well-respected genre and book clubs are often associated with intellectual conversation about Pulitzer-prize winning titles. However, I would argue that if you want to learn about what it means to be human, then all you’ve got to do is visit the Biographies and Memoirs section on Amazon.
My journey into the world began with Ja Rule’s Unruly. The artist dominates my Spotify, but I was keen to know more about the guy behind the raspy voice. When I told a colleague what I was reading, she expressed interest in also flicking through the pages. She borrowed it and then we booked a meeting room for our lunch break, and dissected why longtime collaborator Ashanti wasn’t given more pages, and if his claim that his father invented fat-free cheesecake was true.
Since then, we’ve acquired four more members, given ourselves a name (Read It, My Pony), and read about Daniella Westbrook’s struggles with addictions, Gemma Collins’ argument on why she’s earnt her divaship, how Victoria Beckham became Posh Spice, and what led Lily Allen to quit making music. I’ve read about lives that couldn’t be more different, but I’ve found they have some common threads.
Everyone wants to be special until they are, then they want to prove that they’re just like everybody else. No amount of money or success ever makes someone happy. Love, or the pursuit of it, can often be the unravelling of powerful women. Even the most exciting jobs can be mundane. Nobody is immune to negative opinions.
Getting an insight into the worlds of women such as Cher, Shania Twain, Drew Barrymore, Demi Moore and Jessica Simpson, and learning that they have their insecurities and problems too, reminds me that everyone is just doing their best to figure life out. They just have a few more eyes on them.
*Name has been changed
A version of this article was first published in June 2025.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing Josie.Copson@metro.co.uk
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