Memoirs of a Ghost: One Sheet Away by Cagan Andrea

Author:Cagan, Andrea [Cagan, Andrea]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Andrea Cagan
Published: 2015-07-11T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

UNCHARTED TERRITORY

I’ve been absolutely terrified

every moment of my life—

and I’ve never let it keep me from doing

a single thing I wanted to do.

— Georgia O’Keeffe

Inspiration can show up in the most ordinary places. I was in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the 405 freeway during rush hour one afternoon, bored and aggravated, wondering what would happen if I suddenly needed an ambulance. What if a fellow driver shot me in a fit of road rage and there was no way for anyone to get through? I looked up and saw a news helicopter making slow circles above the traffic, and I had a vision of a rescuer dropping down on a line from a chopper, pulling me out of the car, strapping me into a basket, and having me airlifted and whisked away to intensive care.

I used that image as the opening scene in a novel, and I wrote a story around it. Although I’ve always been an avid reader of fiction, I had never tried my hand at novel writing. I was much more comfortable writing nonfiction, usually someone’s memoir that had a fixed beginning, middle, and end, with an already established roster of personalities. Their individual speech patterns had been developed over real time, they had inherent characteristics, and they were living lives of their own choosing, lives that I had nothing to do with. I was simply a reporter, listening to my clients’ stories, writing them down, and checking for authenticity on Google pages, Internet fan clubs, scandal websites, and published discographies and filmographies. I would ask questions, listen to the answers, do the research, and slowly chip away at the hubris to bring out the deeper emotional content in a private life that had been lived publicly for a very long time.

As a ghostwriter, I honed my interview skills over the years, encouraging a client to recall intimate details of his or her life. It wasn’t always easy to mine those depths, especially if my subject had made decisions along the way never to reveal the treasures that were stored there. Maybe the events were too painful, too personal, or just too far in the past to recall them in detail. But I’ve developed methods over the years to unearth these treasures. My clients sometimes resist me, but it’s my job to keep digging deeper, even when it puts them off.

And it does. I was once sitting with a movie star in her luxurious bedroom that looked like every girly girl’s fantasy. There was lace from Limoges, crystals from Swarovski, lampshades from Tiffany, etched glass from Steuben, and bedding from Ralph Lauren. She was talking about her childhood and how much her parents’ divorce had impacted the family, especially her younger brother. After a while, I said, “You told me how your mother felt about the divorce and how your father and your brother felt about it. But what about you? How did it affect you?”

Her hand flew up to her right temple as she closed her eyes, winced in pain, and let out a groan.

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