Just Don’t Call Her a Ghostwriter

Michelle Burford has a fuzzy, purple ski hat, and when she puts it on, she can channel voices.

It’s a magic she has manifested many times, most recently in helping the actress Cicely Tyson write her memoir “Just as I Am,” which HarperCollins is publishing on Tuesday. The New York Times Book Review praised the “firm, warm, proud, reflective voice on the page” as Burford’s creation.

Normally we would call such a person a ghostwriter, but Burford can’t stand the term.

“Historically, to be a ghostwriter was to be seen as sort of a literary hack,” she said earlier this month during a video interview from her Manhattan apartment. A better way to imagine Burford is as a therapist, a cajoler, a confidante, and then a sort of medium once the hat comes on and the writing starts. (She can’t explain it, it just works.)

But she’s never in the shadows.

Burford has been a collaborator or “story architect” — her preferred titles — on 10 books over the past eight years, and half have become New York Times best sellers. She’s become particularly well known for the memoirs of celebrated Black women that she’s helped shepherd, from her first book, by the Olympic gymnast Gabby Douglas, to those by the musicians Toni Braxton and Alicia Keys, and now Tyson. But Burford has veered in other directions, collaborating with Michelle Knight, one of the women held captive in a Cleveland home for over a decade, and Clint Harp, a carpenter from Waco, Texas, who was a star of the HGTV reality show “Fixer Upper.”

It’s a career she fell into, but unlike so many other writers who take on the strange task of authoring a book for someone else, Burford has owned it, both her active part in these collaborations (her name appears on almost all her books’ covers) and her insistence that it takes skill to excel at this work.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/24/books/michelle-burford-celebrity-memoir.html