No Ghostwriter For Jane Fonda

Posted on April 16, 2005

Kate Medina, Random House executive editor and editor of the bestelling autobiography of Jane Fonda, My Life So Far swears that Ms. Fonda wrote the entire book without any help from a ghostwriter which is, to say the least, unusual. Ms. Medina tells Publisher's Weekly:

"She had absolutely no help on the writing; she's been working on the book for five years and it's been coming to me in pieces for three years. It was always remarkably good; the only thing we had to do was cut, and she was great about that. She said, 'I don't want my book to be so fat that people won't read it. Tell me what you didn't like; tell me where you lost interest.' It's true, it was long. I told her, 'the only problem was that you didn't have any off decades.'"

We doubt that the news that Ms. Fonda slaved over a hot computer late into the night will worry professional ghostwriters much. Most actors and celebrities are - how to put this delicately? - not exactly Hemingway. There, that was tactful, wasn't it?