“Getting to Take on That Life Temporarily.”

An Interview with Ghostwriter Hilary Liftin

Hilary Liftin has two large Amazon boxes waiting for her when I walk up to her Sherman Oaks home. When she opens the door I ask her what she ordered and she says, “Earthquake supplies for the Big One.”

In earthquake terms, the threat of the Big One is still fairly vague—sometime in the next twenty years. But Liftin is about to experience her own personal big one on July 21st, when her first novel debuts: Movie Star by Lizzie Pepper. The title’s built-in meta-ness is warranted, because over the last ten years, Liftin has published fifteen memoirs under the names of other people. She’s one of America’s top celebrity ghostwriters.

Lizzie Pepper resembles a certain story we’ve all seen before—a young actress with glossy brown hair from a beloved American television series that could almost be Dawson’s Creek (but isn’t) is seduced into a fairy-tale romance by one of the world’s top actors who is part of a cult that could almost be Scientology (though it absolutely is not.) The relationship thrives, then falls apart, under the omnipresent lenses of the paparazzi.  

On the surface, Liftin has created a beach read of the highest order, but at its heart, Movie Star by Lizzie Pepper is a very sound rumination on human loneliness and existential alienation. And it is further complexified by Liftin’s career of encouraging Hollywood A-listers to share their secrets with her—the book is labeled as fiction, but is it Jurassic Park or The Devil Wears Prada? Or something else entirely?

Hilary Liftin and I spoke for over an hour, over coffee, on a Tuesday afternoon. She was warm, smart, and evenly hilarious. Her earthquake preparedness kit does not have a gun in it, but she’s thinking of buying cyanide capsules.    

—Kathryn Borel, Jr.

I. A ONE-SIDED RELATIONSHIP

THE BELIEVER: How does a person make the decision to say to themselves, “OK, I will make my career writing as a ghost”?

HILARY LIFTIN: My big break in ghostwriting came when I was still new here in LA and I had no life. That helped, having no life. My book agent put me up for a job for which I didn’t have the credits. It was a book for an A-list actress on a hit TV show and—

BLVR: Can you tell me who it is?

HL: No! But she made the unusual request of the three candidates to write a sample chapter in her voice, over that weekend, without having met her. I turned to my husband and said, “These other two ghostwriters who have...