There are times when you just want something light and fluffy and gossipy to read and what could be better, I thought, than the confessions of a ghostwriter. Surely we’d get to hear the dirt dished on people who hide behind someone else’s words and some insight into the world of high-money vanity publishing? Well, we get a bit of the latter but unfortunately Andrew Crofts is far too discrete to name any of the names you actually want named. When he does drop a name, it’s only to tell us about a time when he nearly got to write somebody’s memoir. So, it fails on the gossip front. But it also, and most surprisingly, fails on exactly the front that Crofts warns against with respect to people wanting their stories told. As he says (on page 94) ‘anecdotes alone will not hold a reader’s attention for 200 or more pages’. Turns out, he’s quite right. I gave up at page 158.