The Ghostwriter
The Ghostwriter
By: Julie Clark
[Fulfilled ‘A book with an occupation in the title’ prompt as part of Shelf Reflection’s 2025 Reading Challenge]
“You can make up whatever you want to be the truth and you can live your life as if you’ve sealed it off forever. But, like a heartbeat behind a wall, the truth is always there, holding you hostage.”
I don’t remember Clark’s book The Last Flight super well, but enough to know that I think I liked that book better than this one.
The Ghostwriter felt a little too unsurprising and drawn out for what it ended up being. Plus there were a few things I would have preferred to be different.
The setting is Ojai, California. (If you’re interested, many celebrities have homes or frequent there including Oprah, Reese Witherspoon, John Krasinski, and Anne Hathaway.)
Our main character is Olivia (Taylor) Dumont, current ghostwriter living detached from her childhood baggage:
“‘Your dad killed his brother and sister. Murdered them in their own home.’… That’s how it started. How I discovered the dark secret that lived at the center of my family.”
“I’ve worked hard to create a life separate from my father, living abroad until I could be certain the American media had forgotten Vincent Taylor ever had a daughter.”
Her dad was sixteen when his older brother and younger sister were murdered. He and his girlfriend (future wife and mother to Olivia) had an alibi for the time of death, but the suspicion stuck around. Whatever happened, it led to her mother eventually abandoning Olivia and her dad and wrecked her father’s ability to be present.
“My father is a talented novelist— a professional liar by trade and by instinct.”
“Despite his many flaws, I don’t believe the man I once worshipped could be a murderer. But fame and trauma turned a once loving father into one I barely recognized. Habits became addictions and the father I knew disappeared, replaced by a man who consistently let me down.”
Olivia can’t stay away forever, though. In fact, she gets herself into a slander lawsuit and legal debt that forces her to accept her father’s request for her to ghostwrite a book for him.
Turns out he’s got Lewy body dementia (what Robin Williams had) which is a cross between Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, affecting his ability to physically and cognitively write.
Olivia thinks she’s going to be editing a first draft of another of his famous novels, but it’s actually a memoir: “a dark and atmospheric book that would explain exactly how both Danny and Poppy died… [ending] his five decades of silence [to] tell the truth.”
She wades her way through all his notes and stuff, piecing together what really happened in the 1970s at the Taylor house.
“My father either killed them and wants to admit it, or he didn’t and he wants me to figure out who did.”
So, an intriguing premise. But I feel like we got a few too many pieces of the puzzle too early, so even though I didn’t have every detail figured out, I was pretty hot on the scent, and it didn’t feel super surprising when it all came together.
Plus the person that had evidence but didn’t do anything with it! Did not like that. How could anyone have that and be like—it won’t help anything. The way things could have been so different… it didn’t feel like a realistic choice for that character.
I also wasn’t a fan of the flow of the book. While Olivia is investigating, she will pose an important question and then we get a flashback chapter that answers her question. But it answers it for the reader, not for Olivia. So we are getting more information than she is and it makes it hard to remember what clues she knows and what we know ahead of her.
I wish it was presented like we were learning the information alongside Olivia.
Another thing that wasn’t my favorite was the heavy feminist thread. I read a lot of strong female lead books and even some high on women empowerment, and it’s fine. I love being a woman. I love when books portray strong, intelligent and competent women who can do all sorts of things. It’s great.
But in this book it was just…. a lot.
Poppy lived in the 70s when women were first fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment.
“At the end her walls were covered with collages of Betty Friedan. Shirley Chisholm. Gloria Steinem. Those were Poppy’s heroes.”
Olivia’s father likens her with her aunt Poppy:
“Poppy would have admired your ferocious commitment to elevating female and marginalized voices.”
In high school Olivia was a founding member of the Women’s Empowerment Club and as an adult she even “pitched a book to AOC.”
The legal battle she got into was due to some public comments she made about a fellow male author being a white supremacist… among other things.
A feminist is a valid character personality. I get it. It’s a real thing.
But then we have these quotes that were probably the point where I was like- nope.
“We return our attention to the documentary. Father penguins caring for their babies while the mothers went off to find food. What an upside-down world we humans live in.”
Okay, so they’re watching March of the Penguins and when she sees the father caring for the eggs, she observes that HUMANS live in an upside down world. As if the penguins are the perfect ideal for all life. I’m pretty sure there are insects and animals where the mother eats her young. Do we really want to make the animal kingdom our standard for ‘right side up’? That is just a WILD comment.
And then we have these two (from Poppy):
“Fear is a tool of the patriarchy. It’s how our parents control where we go and what we do. The majority of people in this world are good.”
Fear is indeed a tool used for control. It is also used by literally every group of people in some way across the entire globe in all of history so let’s not pretend “the patriarchy” (whatever that is) invented it or even specialized in it. I think communist regimes and totalitarian governments have the monopoly on that tactic. And sure the majority of people are not killers, but sin natures are real and I see them exposed all the time, so let’s also not pretend we’re all out here being kind and loving all the time. Have you been on the internet lately??
“Don’t you get tired of constantly having to live a lesser life than our male counterparts?”
A lesser life? I don’t see how women are constantly living lesser lives than males. Sexism is real and exists, but it’s not a constant or the norm. I think a more common struggle we could ask another woman is— are you tired of constantly having a period?
I know there’s going to be a lot of readers that would really love a character like Poppy or Olivia and that is great for you. If this was the only thing in the book that bothered me, it would be whatever, but I think because there were some other things, it just is not my favorite book.
[If you want some good reading material that speaks into this, I would recommend Radical Womanhood and a(Typical) Woman.]
One thing that I did like was how Clark opted to resolve the conflict between Olivia and Tom. Tom is Olivia’s partner and lying is a major non-starter for him. Because of the nature of the ghostwriting work and the way Olivia has blocked out the past from her life, this was obviously going to come up and create a conflict between the two of them.
As much as Olivia was a feminist character, I did appreciate that when things got hard, she wanted to put in the time to make things work with Tom. She has not written off all men. I liked that there was restoration there instead of a ‘one-and-done, I don’t need him’ type of mentality.
“I’m beginning to realize that once you lie about your past, you wall yourself off from the present.”
A last sidenote. Ghostwriting is an interesting profession. It obviously caused me to wonder— how many memoirs are actually written by ghostwriters? So I did some googling and came across this site that estimated 80-90% of celebrity memoirs are written by ghostwriters!
I have mixed feelings about this. I guess it makes sense because it takes a lot of skill to write a book. Not just anybody can do it. And we have all these celebrities that people are curious about but they don’t have time or expertise to tell people their stories. Of course they need to use a professional to make it happen.
I think I care less that memoirs are written by ghostwriters than fiction. James Patterson obviously has to use ghostwriters to crank out the number of books under his name. Apparently ghostwriters often like being in the shadows, but it just feels like cheating to me for them not to get credit. It feels like lying for a different byline to be on the cover when that person didn’t do the writing.
But the concept of being a ghostwriter and being the one to ask the questions and find the right group of stories to tell to present a specific image is interesting to me.
Recommendation
It’s a decent book and probably a great book for certain readers, but there were just a few things that made it… not my favorite.
I liked the female characters Clark created in The Last Flight, so I am not writing off Julie Clark as an author— I think I could enjoy other books by her in the future. At least at this point.
So I view this book as a hit or miss, decide for yourself.
[Content Advisory: 16 f-words, 13 s-words; LGBTQ relationship with side characters; some child abuse]
**Received an ARC via NetGalley**
This book just published in June, 2025. You can order a copy of this book using my affiliate link below.
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