The Ghostwriter

Between two naive and innocent souls, anything can happen. Soulmates or Tragedy. And sometimes, both.

There is nothing like young love. It comes at a time before the heart knows to protect itself, when everything important is raw and exposed—the perfect environment for a soul-sucking, heart-crushing burst.

Funny what you find out about people when they leave you. Or when your mind stops making excuses for all of their clues.

That is how life is, it gives us burdens to carry and doesn’t give a damn about the weight. We shoulder it or we break.

There is something soothing about the act of writing, a drug that lures you into another world, but then forgets to stop, and sometimes carries you all the way into sleepdom.

When You Say You Are Going to Do Something, Shut the Hell Up and Do It.

We all have a Happily Ever After, each story just needs to pick the right time to claim it.

This is why I avoid men. This is why I avoid people in general. We are a disgusting, foul race, only a few centuries past smearing our faces with feces and dancing for rain.

You can become anything,” I say to her. “Make sure that you don’t become selfish, unimaginative and dumb.

In New York, if you invite random strangers in for tea, you’ll be raped and dead within a week. I think that’s almost the way it should be; we should all have a healthy fear of each other.

But back then, I only dreamed about, yearned for, and wrote about love. I didn't realize what a brutal beast it could be.

Some people are just having a misfire of judgment or control. But other people are letting you see a bit of the rotten person inside. Their cruel or stupid behavior is a gift of sorts, because it lets you see the real person that they are beneath.

We are authors, and our lives are not the ones we live, but rather the characters that we create.

He doesn’t know anything yet. He knows I fell for a boy. He knows I had a baby. All he knows are the first lines of a song. He hasn’t even heard the melody yet.

a bookworm without friends, a condition worthy of concern.

I’d decided to believe him, but I’d never trusted him again.

Something stops in my chest, and the guilt is almost impossible to breathe through. I tighten my fingers around the pen and force myself to lower it to the page.

I delete the last line, and then the entire paragraph. Lies. I am forgetting that this is not an ordinary novel, that I can’t take fictional liberties, can’t provide clues, or lead the readers down a path I didn’t travel.

It had been love. From the very beginning. Wild. Crazy. Senseless. Love

that’s what infuriates me about the woman, even more than her perfectly pouty lips and incessant publicity. She’s wasting her talent. She could be giving us more.

It’s not that hard to write a book. The words are easy. What’s difficult is the ability to breathe life into them.

She came here, staked out in my home, listened to my diagnosis, yet she wants her own pity party, one that starts with an accusatory question and ends with a clinical diagnosis, one where I am to blame, and she is the victim.

Maybe it’s something between two artistic minds, the writing process a bonding one, a type of personal interaction that her contracts and deadlines can’t compare to.

He won’t stop spending, and I only watch and say nothing. Our house fills with things; I close the door to my office and write. The more I earn, the more he spends.

It was an incredible trip, even if Simon and I did fight on the ride home. Even if he did let her order chicken fingers and soda off the French restaurant’s menu—robbing her of a rare opportunity for culture. Instead, she ate tan sticks of chicken that had been nuked in a microwave somewhere, with a side of fries. Not even poutine. Just plain old French fries, dipped in fat globs of

My mind can’t move off the fact that Marka, the blonde siren of romance, is this crumpled old pile of masculinity. The fingers that drum the table before me, scarred and cracked, with short nails and knuckle hair, are the ones that wrote The Virgin’s Pleasure.