Writer & author
Every life is a book. Most are badly shelved.
I write essays, profiles, and other people's memoirs — fifteen years of finding the sentence a story has been trying to say all along.
In one line
Essayist, ghostwriter, and author of quiet books.
The practice
The work is listening, then cutting
I began as a newspaper obituarist, which teaches you two permanent lessons: everyone's life is more interesting than they think, and you have four hundred words. Everything since — the magazine essays, the profiles, the two books with my name on them and the nine without — has been that same job at different lengths.
Ghostwriting is most of my practice now. It works like this: we talk for hours, over months. I take the transcripts, the letters, the shoeboxes. Then I write a book in a voice that is recognizably, sometimes uncomfortably, yours. My clients describe the finished manuscript the same way often enough that I believe it: 'It sounds like me on my best day.'
I take four commissions a year. The queue is real, and worth it.
The work
Commissions
A small number of projects each year, taken one at a time.
Memoir Ghostwriting
A full-length memoir from interviews to a publication-ready manuscript — nine to fourteen months, one book at a time.
Thought-Leadership Books
The book your field has been asking you to write: argument, structure, and a voice that survives the editing committee.
Essays & Long-Form Features
Commissioned essays and profiles for publications and institutions — reported, drafted, and delivered clean.
Manuscript Doctoring
Your draft, my pencil: a full structural edit with margin notes and a letter explaining what the book wants to be.
From clients
“I talked; she listened; a year later I held a book that sounded like me on my best day. My children learned things about my life from a stranger's sentences. Extraordinary.”
“Cassandra took nine years of my research and found the argument I'd been circling the whole time. The book did more for the work than any paper I've published.”
“Her structural edit was surgical. Two pages of her margin notes were worth more than the two years I'd spent alone with the draft.”
Questions
Asked, quietly
How does ghostwriting stay confidential?
A signed agreement covers it before the first interview: your story is yours, my silence is contractual, and credit is whatever we agree — full ghost, 'with', or named co-author.
What does a book project involve from me?
Mostly conversation: twenty to thirty hours of interviews spread over months, then reading drafts and telling me where I've got you wrong. The writing is my job; the truth is yours.
Why is the fee what it is?
A book takes most of a year of my working life, and I only carry one at a time alongside essays. Half my clients come after a cheaper first attempt; the fee buys the version that gets finished.
Do you help with publishing?
Yes — proposal, agent introductions where the book warrants them, and honest advice about whether traditional or independent publishing serves your story better.
Correspondence
Tell me the story you keep almost writing.
A letter is the right first move — who you are, what the book is, why now. I answer every serious inquiry personally, usually within a week.
Contact