Ghostwriter giving shape to own career

After ghostwriting for almost 20 years for one of London's most flamboyant literary and financial figures, Jennie Erdal's patience wore thin. She could see the layers of deception accelerating.

Besides, confrontations with Naim Attallah, an autocratic, bombastic, eccentric man, were stressful.

So she bailed, telling him she wanted to take her life in "a different direction."

He asked, "What would you do?"

"Writing," she replied.

"You should realize it is bloody difficult to write!" he said.

He didn't get it. So she waited about three more years before she actually stopped "ghosting."

So goes the amazing story Erdal tells in her fascinating memoir, "Ghosting: A Double Life."

Erdal said she never considered writing about the process of ghostwriting until she left the job in 2000. "Then I needed to do nothing for awhile," she said by phone from her home in St. Andrews, Scotland. "But I wanted passionately to write fiction. This story was pressing on my head, and so I began to use it fictionally. Then I thought, 'Why am I fictionalizing it when the reality is so much stranger?'"

So she wrote the book, and it has been very popular in the UK. In the meantime, her subject, Attallah, whom she calls "Tiger" in her book, has been giving interviews declaring himself "betrayed" by Erdal.

("The biggest betrayal in all of mankind!")

Yet, in spite of what Erdal calls his "litigious tendencies," he has said he will not sue.

For her part, Erdal said "there is no libel in the book," and she calls Attallah "a wonderful person to write about. His faults are all tangled up with his virtues. You can't say that about everyone. This is my story, not his. I am not out to demonize him."

Indeed she doesn't. She portrays a balanced human being who is "bigger than life," charismatic, interesting and energetic, yet obsessive, autocratic and unyielding.

When Erdal's marriage failed and she had three children to support, she needed a job. In the beginning, she was acting as "a personal assistant, secretary, researcher" for Attallah, who made his fortune in banking and then developed a publishing house in London. Gradually, her duties changed. She started writing lectures for him to give, articles, books, novels — and even "intimate letters."

Her role developed so gradually that she wasn't aware for a long time that what she was doing was not moral — that writing material for someone else to say without attribution was "ghosting." She says neither she nor Attallah ever used that word.