A few days ago I went to see Barbara Feinman Todd speak at Georgetown, as a guest of the Georgetown Writer's Series. Feinman Todd heads up the journalism school, and, in a previous life, was a ghost writer. As a ghost writer, she fell largely into writing for political figures - most "famously" (infamously?) for Hillary Clinton. The fame part came in from the fact that when she was hired for the project, it was announced that she would "help prepare the manuscript" of It Takes a Village - and yet, when the book was published, Clinton did not acknowledge either her or anyone else by name for their assistance in bringing the book into being. Something akin to an uproar ensued, and Feinman Todd humourously refers to the incident as "ThankYou-Gate" in her article "Ghost Writing." When I asked her where along the road to recovery - or how far into ghosting "rehab" - she is, she answered that she'd been dealing with it pretty well until recently. In January the New Yorker ran a long article on Hillary Clinton, that included a reference to her work on It Takes a Village. As a democrat, she said, it is difficult to find your cause taken up to serve conservative ideals.

She said she got into ghost writing thinking that it would help her develop her writing voice - that by getting into the skin of others, she would really be able to develop the characterisation that is so important to novel-writing, her first love. Apparently, what she has trouble with is plot - oh, that old thing! I'm guessing ghosting for someone else doesn't necessarily help with the mechanics of a story, so perhaps it was already playing to her strengths. Ghost writing? Not a path she'd recommend, however interesting her past makes her seem at cocktail parties. In fact, she said if anyone was considering it as a career option after her talk (the upside? money) she would take them out for a drink and talk them out of it. It seems like the problem is the entrapment in the field: money and constant work must be a lure. Says the graduate student.

I was particularly interested in the project she has started at the Journalism school - the "Pearl Project," and she spoke about this on Monday. Faculty and students are investigating the "what really happened" to the reporter Danny Pearl, who, while working on a story in Karachi in 2002, was kidnapped and murdered. Part of the project may involve an attempt to complete the story Pearl was working on at the time of his death. Feinman Todd is hoping that in the future, they will be able to run similar projects in the future through funds that the journalism school has received to continue this kind of work.