GHOSTING: A DOUBLE LIFE, by Jennie Erdal, Doubleday, 270 pages, $24.

"Ghosting" is likely to be one of the best memoirs you will read this year — an extraordinarily well-written story of Jennie Erdal's almost 20-year career as a ghostwriter for a flamboyant British publisher.

Originally hired to edit Russian books, her responsibilities gradually broadened until she was writing essentially everything to which Naim Attallah attached his name — to include speeches, articles, newspaper columns, a nonfiction book about women, novels and even intimate letters.

As each project presented itself, Erdal found herself arguing with her boss about whether it should be done and whether she should be the one to write it. Attallah, who is aptly nicknamed "Tiger" in these pages, seems to have pulled the wool over his own eyes. He always talked about what "we" would write next, when in fact, Erdal did all of the writing.

Tiger followed the process, read her chapters periodically and argued over word usage and approach — and, according to this book, she won their battles at least half the time.

Although the realization that she was doing something that was morally wrong finally settled in her mind, it took a long time for Erdal to divorce herself from the process.

Even though Erdal worked at home in Scotland most of the time, Tiger maintained a "hotline" from his London office and called her continuously. When they were together in London, she could not work because he could literally not stop talking.

Regularly, Tiger suggested outrageous approaches that bothered her, including erotic sex scenes in the two novels.

Why did she do it? Because she needed the money. Her marriage unexpectedly ended, and she was left with three children to support. She was vulnerable and never worried about whether her name was attached to whatever she wrote. Even after several years, she never actually asked him if they could change the policy and start putting her name on the books.

The memoir not only tells an amazing story in a gifted style, it inadvertently teaches much about how to write effectively. Erdal is candid about how she wrote the various books and projects and the care she applied to them.

Yet, she is even-handed in her approach toward her former boss, pointing out both his strengths and his weaknesses. At one point, she writes, " . . . his language was so powerfully engaged with its purpose that the style had an inimitable, inscrutable verbal genius all of its own. And yet his sentences were a riot of hangings and danglings, while the subject and predicate, being scarcely ever on speaking terms, always put up a fearful fight before being mediated into a suspension of hostilities."

Although Erdal took up an unexpected career, she began to realize she was good at it. "Indeed, whenever I managed to loosen the shackles of the ghost, I quite enjoyed the writing. There were even the beginnings of a belief that I may always have been a writer in my head."

Now that she is permanently free of ghosting, Erdal is writing a novel of her own. And while she is doing it in her 50s, her own literary career seems destined to take off.

Ironically, her previous work speaks for itself.

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E-mail: dennis@desnews.com