Ghostwriter

Lawrence Wells's ""Ghostwriter"" manuscript was awarded the 2014 Faulkner-Wisdom Prize for narrative nonfiction at the Words and Music Festival in New Orleans. His memoir In Faulkner's Shadow, about his thirty-eight-year marriage to Dean Faulkner Wells, was published by University Press of Mississippi in 2020. Wells is also the author of two historical novels, Rommel and the Rebel and Let the Band Play Dixie.

Wells is a skilled storyteller, and his ability to capture the uncanny, metafictional nature of ghostwriting is by turns profound and comic: 'To think like Mrs. F is to don an imaginary kimono. Since she's not here, as ghostwriter it's my duty to represent her. I've learned to imitate her style of composition, to write in jerks and starts, reacting to someone else's ideas. The next logical step is to anticipate her thoughts.' His quixotic quest concerns literary history but also family histories, as well as the stories people tell themselves to contextualize their confusing place in the world." - Kirkus Reviews "Wonderfully funny and witty, veers from bathos to magic, from subtle to sublime. I felt as if I were entering a dusty maze, a strange mad place where nothing is as it seems. It gave me goose bumps and made me laugh in equal measure. I was hooked from the first paragraph, and it got better." - Rosemary Kingsland, coauthor of Magical Mystery Tours: My Life with the Beatles and author of The Secret Life of a Schoolgirl: A Memoir "This book is outright wonderful! Brilliantly conceived. Very clever and falling-down funny. I admire how Wells weaves together the stories of his literary quest, his working relationship with 'Mrs. F,' a literary tour of England, and his wife Dean's obsession with the breakup of Prince Charles and Princess Diana. It all fits and is a very clever construction. Mrs. F is an unforgettable character." - David Sheffield, former head writer at Saturday Night Live and co-screenwriter of Coming to America, Boomerang, and The Nutty Professor "Everything about the book is right. . . . It's brilliant." - Kathleen Wallace King, author of Maybelleen: A Novel and The True Life Story of Isobel Roundtree: A Novel