Halfway through her review of Liza Minnelli’s memoir, in our May 28 issue, Frances Wilson talks about love. Minnelli, she writes, has the “capacity to fall in love instantly, as though hypnotized.” This kind of helpless love is a trait that seems to unite many of the subjects Wilson has written about in the Review. Sybille Bedford’s “hunger for love was insatiable”; Patricia Highsmith could fall “in love at first sight and she could fall in love several times in one night.” In the Mitford family, the women “fell in love with their masters, whom they then worshiped,” and in Iris Murdoch’s world, “falling in love always happens instantly.” It also provides Wilson a window into her subjects’ deeper concerns, whether it’s George Orwell’s love for roses demonstrating the value he gave to pleasure or Minnelli’s love for her mother reflecting her fear of becoming her. This is not to say that love defines these people, but it certainly sets the stage. “Enter Minnelli’s ghoulish fourth husband,” Wilson writes, “the one we have all been waiting for.”

Wilson is a historian and biographer in her own right, having written books about D.H. Lawrence, Thomas De Quincey, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Muriel Spark, among others. In our pages she has also written about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Tove Jansson, Katherine Mansfield, and Charlotte Brontë, and her essays about everyone from Princess Diana to Charles Dickens to Clarence Thomas can be found in the TLS, The New Statesman, The Guardian, and many other publications.

I wrote to Wilson this week to ask her about Minnelli, ghostwriters, addiction memoirs, and the pursuit of style in biography.

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Chandler Fritz: I gather you aren’t a true Liza fan—that is, you didn’t go into this assignment knowing every word of “Say Liza (Liza with a ‘Z’)” by heart—but did reading about her life and watching some of her performances shake anything loose for you? Is there something about her art form that will stick with you?

Frances Wilson: Reading Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! certainly shook something loose for me—that’s a fine way of putting it. Minnelli’s appeal, like that of Princess Diana, is that she has suffered as much as her fans; she performed with empathy, and I became fascinated by how her emotional load fired her performances and stirred up her audience. What I had not recognized before about her art was its closeness to exorcism, and also to matricide: Minnelli was exploding Garland out of her system. Even on the small screen, watching her break the sound barrier was like participating in a cult ritual.

You describe the book, which was cowritten by two journalists using transcripts of conversations between Minnelli and her close friend Michael Feinstein, as “a team effort not unlike the construction of a musical.” This seems a perhaps more than usually frank acknowledgment of the industry involved in publishing books, especially celebrity memoirs. How do you evaluate ghostwritten memoirs relative to those purportedly written by their credited authors? Do you grade on a kind of curve? 

Most memoirists Botox out their own imperfections, but celebrity ghostwriters tend to do the full face-lift, which is not surprising given that celebrity memoirs usually serve as promotional material. I don’t at all think that ghostwritten, or team-written, memoirs are inferior—quite the opposite. I like the idea of detaching the subject from their story. I was relieved, for example, that Prince Harry didn’t write Spare himself; would that all memoirs were as articulate.

Josh Getlin and Heidi Evans have done an excellent job catching Minnelli’s conversational energy while maintaining the contradictions in her character: if I were to grade ghosted memoirs, Kids would get top score. It is, as you say, unusual to acknowledge the teamwork that goes into making books of this kind, but the most curious aspect of Kids is the serenading of Michael Feinstein, who surely did little more than turn on the tape recorder and have a chat with his friend. Crediting him on the cover is wonderfully ironic given the significance for Minnelli of being billed alongside her mother for the London Palladium. Adding to the irony is Garland and Minnelli’s shared history—described by Minnelli in detail—of putting their lives in the hands of gay men. This is quite literally what she has done here.

I’m fascinated by the transactions involved in ghostwriting. The relationship is as bound by loyalty as the one between the psychoanalyst and their client, so it is rare to hear the inside story. Jennie Erdal’s Ghosting describes her experience of writing for twenty years on behalf of the louche publisher Naim Attallah; when Attallah wanted to put his name on a 1,200-page book of interviews with famous women, Erdal wrote his questions and transcribed the answers; she also ghosted his novels and his articles for the Erotic Review. Her role in Attallah’s life, she says, was akin to selling her soul, and his demands on her time destroyed her marriage.

Several of my friends have ghosted, and what they all say is that the putative author always believes, once the book is finished, that they in fact wrote it themselves and the ghost was simply the scribe. “I couldn’t have done it without you,” I once heard an “author”—who had done absolutely nothing—tell his ghost as he vigorously shook her hand. Attallah even took credit for Erdal’s exposé of him: “One of the things I have achieved, I recognize talent, if you like,” he boasted in an interview with The Bookseller. The ghosts themselves don’t always stay invisible but leave their trace on the page. “Writing is always personal,” Erdal concedes. “You reveal yourself to yourself.”

Minnelli’s memoir doubles as a story of recovery. You’ve written a whole book on the original addiction memoirist, Thomas De Quincey. Has much changed in the genre since Confessions of an English Opium-Eater? 

I’m glad you asked that question because I thought a good deal about De Quincey, the subject of my biography Guilty Thing, while I was reading Kids. De Quincey invented the genre that we now call “quit lit,” although he lied, in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, when he said that he was freed from the curse of opium—or rather laudanum, because he dissolved the drug in alcohol. There wasn’t a day when De Quincey didn’t take opium; his Confessions were written on opium; he even described opium as the “hero” of the book, and he continued to take it for the rest of his life. His lie would have put him in the stocks today, but in 1822 there was no presumption that a memoirist was required to tell the truth.

De Quincey’s hymn to the celestial substance that was “the secret of happiness” was so enticing that he was accused of creating a nation of addicts. But the readers of his Confessions were a nation of addicts to begin with because opium was the only available pain relief, as essential to a household as aspirin today. Even dogs were dosed with it. De Quincey blamed his addiction on the emotionally numbing effects of the drug itself—“Happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket”—while Minnelli describes her addictive personality as burned into her DNA. Her grandmother, mother, and siblings were also addicts. In addition to pills and alcohol, her never-ending need to love and be loved also read as addictive to me.

Recovery memoirs now are two a penny and should be filed under self-help. What’s interesting about Kids is that while Minnelli claims to be telling a tale of addiction, she—or her ghosts—keep going off track, and the theme that becomes central to the story is her fear of becoming her mother.

In your review of Roger Lewis’s dual biography of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, you note how Lewis’s strange writing style recreates, in a way, the strangeness of his subjects’ stardom. What do you think is the proper function of style in literary biography? Should the biographer’s style put us in the mind of her subject? 

My constant gripe about biographies is how poorly written they often are, and Roger Lewis is an exuberant exception to the rule. I wish literary biographers paid more attention to style rather than providing the usual roll call of facts and dates, as though they were compiling an obituary or Wikipedia entry. Janet Malcolm was right in The Silent Woman when she described how readers of biographies tolerate any amount of bad writing in the belief that they are having an elevating experience. Her insight should be torn out of the book and pinned above the desk of every biographer.

I don’t think the literary biographer’s style should put us in the mind of their subject, but imbibing a writer’s style is one way of accessing their mind. It is impossible, when a biographer is totally immersed—or possessed—by the subject, not to merge with them in some way; Muriel Spark was surprised to find, when she revised her life of Mary Shelley thirty years after its first publication, that she had unconsciously taken on something of Shelley’s style.

I consciously write bespoke biographies, cutting my cloth to fit my subject. It’s a form of homage for me to write a De Quinceyian life of De Quincey, a Lawrencian life of D.H. Lawrence, or a Sparkian biography of Spark.

Did you ever meet Dame Muriel? Were there any challenges that came with writing a biography of someone whose life overlapped with your own, rather than a historical figure? 

I didn’t meet Spark, although I know many people who did. Meeting her would have made little difference to the book because Electric Spark is about understanding her as a writer rather than as a woman; she put everything she was into her novels and instructed us to read them “between the lines,” so this is what I did. Although I discovered Spark in the 1980s, I did not see her life as overlapping with my own in Electric Spark because my focus was on her time as an apprentice mage in the Forties and Fifties, before she became famous. It was a strange experience, however, to write about someone so recently dead, before her reputation has settled. Her presence was still so fresh that I felt at times as though I, too, were ghostwriting.