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When Prince Harry chose to work with ghostwriter JR Moehringer on his institution-shaking memoir, Spare, he was not taking half measures. The American writer and Pulitzer prize-winning journalist does not have a huge output, but he is known for his immersive approach to subjects, his preoccupation with the father-son relationship, and his capacity to “go deep”.
When he worked with Andre Agassi on ghostwriting his celebrated 2009 memoir Open, the tennis star said Moehringer moved to Las Vegas and bought a house a mile away, where he lived for two years. They would meet in the mornings over Whole Foods breakfast burritos, Agassi said.
More recently, the 58-year-old worked with Nike founder Phil Knight on his memoir, Shoe Dog.
Under his own name, he has written his 2005 memoir, The Tender Bar, which formed the basis of a 2021 film starring Ben Affleck (it was reportedly its director, George Clooney, who introduced him to Harry), and a 2012 novel Sutton.
Agassi said he sought out Moehringer to write his memoir – “romancing” him to do it after reading The Tender Bar. “It was the first autobiography I’d read that didn’t feel like a global press conference,” he told the New York Times.
Patrick Janson-Smith, who published the 2012 novel about the American bank robber Willie Sutton, said Moehringer’s own memoir was “extraordinary” and that he is a “natural born writer”.
“And this I think is what informs his take on both Agassi and Harry,” Janson-Smith told the Observer. “In the sense of loss is something that will inform the book.”
Raised in Manhasset, a commuter town on Long Island in New York and the backdrop to The Great Gatsby, Moehringer and his mother lived in cramped conditions with his grandparents after she separated from his father.
In 2012 he described meeting his father as a teenager. “I was too filled with longing for a father,” he told the US broadcaster NPR. “And I was too emotionally overwrought by the moment to notice any disparity between the voice and the person.”
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In his memoir, he describes his toxic relationship with alcohol after leaving Yale, where he was a scholarship student, when Steve, the owner of his favourite bar, died. “I drank to get drunk. I drank because I couldn’t think what else to do. I drank the way Steve drank at the end, to achieve oblivion,” he wrote.
Janson-Smith thought Sutton was a “terrific novel”, but the public response was underwhelming. “Sadly nothing happened. I don’t think it got a single review so it was very disappointing,” said the retired publisher and chair of London literary agency Greyhound Literary.
Generally, though, his work has attracted the attention of critics, readers and fellow writers.
Ghostwriter and author Daniel Paisner, who worked with tennis star Serena Williams on her 2009 memoir On the Line, said he first came across Moehringer’s collaborative work when he read the Agassi memoir. “It was one of the best sport memoirs ever written,” he said.
After starting his writing career at the New York Times as a news assistant, Moehringer was later recruited by the Los Angeles Times, where he won the Pulitzer prize in feature writing for his article Crossing Over. Nowadays, he is understood to live in California.
Madeleine Morel, an agent who “matchmakes” book projects with ghostwriters, said Moehringer had come to epitomise the ultimate in ghostwriting.
“He’s the pinnacle,” she told the Observer. “I’m sure everybody aspires to be him. He’s such a brilliant writer. It’s very hard to ghostwrite a book and at some level never have it sound like it was written by somebody else.”
