This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Not many newspapers bothered to review Jungle Run, a second volume of memoirs by Cheryl Espinoza, the one-time glamour model famous for having downed a half-pint of maggots on live TV, but those that did were pleasantly surprised.
“It is rare that a writer not known for their ability to handle a pen manages to improve their style from one book to the next,” wrote the Daily Mail’s critic, “but somehow Ms Espinoza has managed it.”
Reading this encomium at her kitchen table in Chiswick, Miriam Spector felt a little glow of satisfaction, for the real author of the book — at this point ranked seventh in the Sunday Times best-seller list — was herself.
What drove Miriam into the fraught, murky yet agreeably lucrative world of celebrity ghostwriting? As so often, the prompts were happenstance and instinct.
She was working as a junior editor for messrs Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, a fine old firm since reconstituted on more commercial lines, when somebody noticed that the autobiography of Sylvester Dragon, the notorious Fulchester United centre-back, although supposedly finessed into shape by his agent, was very nearly illiterate.
Miriam, who possessed the advantage over her colleagues of actually knowing who Sylvester Dragon was, volunteered for the job of rewriting it.
Miriam was once compelled to spend a week in January in the Arctic Circle
All that was ten years ago. Sylvester is playing in the MLS for Cincinnati Sliders now and paying two lots of alimony. In contrast, Miriam’s career has flourished.
After working on two more footballers’ memoirs, including Lee Fredge’s “sensational” Boot-room Bust-ups, and refashioning a celebrity chef’s confessional to the point where it could be allowed out into the world without embarrassment, she was sufficiently emboldened to leave Rosencrantz & Guildenstern and set up on her own.
There followed an absurdly well-paid commission to ghost the memoirs of a TV comedienne, whose notional author was so gratified by the results that she invited her amanuensis to appear alongside her on early-morning TV.
What is the secret of Miriam’s success? Part of it is down to her modest and deferential manner. Then there is her outward indifference to some of the drawbacks that the trade involves: the unsocial hours and the having to dance attendance on one’s clients in odd parts of the world in yet more peculiar circumstances. Miriam was once compelled to spend a week in January in a hotel on the Arctic Circle whilst the Hollywood actress Mandasue Rattler reminisced about her early life on an Arizona cattle ranch in between takes on the blockbusting adventure movie Polar Apocalypse.
At the heart of Miriam’s achievement, though, lies her genuine relish for what she does. Sad to relate, there are celebrity ghostwriters who despise their clients and entertain select little dinner parties with scuttlebutt about their personal failings, but Miriam is not amongst their number.
She leads a quiet life, keeps the congratulatory emails from her sponsors printed out in a desk drawer and was, as she remarked, “thrilled” by the recent invitation to serve as godmother to the newly-born daughter of Tallulah Aberconway, star of Desperate Housewives of Kensington.
