Be Like a Boy
Tenacity Tales: A Love Letter to Debut Novelist Sarah Tomlinson
Our January Tale is Sarah Tomlinson, author of the memoir Good Girl (Gallery Books, 2015), ghostwriter of more than 20 celebrity memoirs including Russ Tamblyn’s Dancing on the Edge (Blackstone Publishing, April 9, 2024) and—coming February, 13, 2024—her debut novel The Last Days of the Midnight Ramblers (Flatiron Books, February 13, 2024), a literary mystery about Mari Hawthorn, a ghost writer hired to write a tell-all memoir of Anke Berben, an aging pop-culture icon best known for the rumor that she may have had a role in the death of one of the founders of The Midnight Ramblers, an internationally beloved classic rock band.
Every Tenacity Tales is a love letter to artistic tenacity, but this month’s tale is also a love letter to the indefatigable spirit of my dear friend Sarah Tomlinson.1
To be honest, I’m not sure how I’m going to get through drafting this tale. I’ve barely started the second paragraph, and my eyes are filling with yet another round of the happy tears I’ve shed since Sarah called to share the screamingly good news that she’d finally—FINALLY!!—sold not just The Last Days of the Midnight Ramblers,2 but a second book on the strength of its premise alone.
When Sarah and I met in our early twenties, Sarah was a music journalist who wore a black leather jacket over band t-shirts, while I was an assistant editor at a parenting magazine who wore blazers with shoulder pads. We were an odd pairing from the jump—Sarah spent her nights hanging out with actual rock stars, while I spent mine playing geeky board games with my fellow nerds—but the origin story of our odd-couple friendship is a tale for another day.3
This particular tale is about Sarah’s tenacity.
Maybe it’s a function of spending decades riding shot gun on the road trip of Sarah’s writing life, but Sarah is the single-most tenacious writer I know.
In an early draft of this tale, this was the point I invited the reader to travel back in time some twenty years with me, but as tears threatened again4 I realized that if I wanted to write this tenacity tale without inadvertently breaking ground on a memoir of writerly friendship, I needed to challenge myself to demonstrate Sarah’s tenacity in just three vignettes.
So, here goes nothing!
The Scrappy Freelance Writer
During her scrappy freelance years, Sarah could only afford to keep her music journalism dream alive5 by doggedly chasing down every writing-for-hire job she could find. She wrote copy for medical web sites, pitched profiles on quirky entrepreneurs, and covered a maternity leave for the calendar editor at a parenting magazine,6 and those are just the assignments that are still top of mind twenty-something years later.
What I remember vividly, though, was that Sarah was often juggling multiple deadlines a day, an arrangement that didn’t leave a lot of time for Because the Night, the novel she was writing about Maddie Snowe, a kick-ass rock star fighting to keep singing while grieving the death of the man who was both her band’s guitarist and the love of her life.
One night during these early years, Sarah found herself at a party in a house shared by a handful of local Boston musicians, One of the hosts—a guitarist, as it happens—hung out for just a few minutes before sneaking back to his bedroom, closing the door between him and the party, and—with his headphones and guitar plugged into his amp—practicing while the party raged. He had an audition to tour with a popular UK indie band the next week, and if he wanted to be fully prepared, he couldn’t afford to take a night off.
It was an extreme example of a phenomenon Sarah had seen time and again among male musicians—they did the work their dreams demanded of them, even if it meant closing the door on a party they were supposed to help host. Inspired, Sarah adopted the mantra BE LIKE A BOY to help her say no to others—kindly of course—so she could say yes to herself. Because although Sarah was already being like a boy by fearlessly throwing her hat into the ring for freelance assignment after freelance assignment, she could certainly stand to be a little more like a boy when it came to Because the Night.
Being like a boy meant making time to write her novel.
Being like a boy meant being unapologetic about the anger and ambitions of her grieving female protagonist.
And being like a boy meant buying a bottle of the expensive champagne to keep in the back of the refrigerator as a daily reminder that finishing the novel was her first priority.
A few years later, Sarah’s be-like-a-boy mantra manifested in a breathless voicemail:
“I’m calling to tell you I finished Because the Night this afternoon,” she said in an awed whisper: “It didn’t seem real until I told you it’s done—done! So, I’m gonna go open that bottle of champagne!”
Writer at a Crossroads
Fast forward a few years.
Sarah has moved to Los Angeles and—because the journalism industry had started to teeter—taken on a ghostwriting gig only to discover she loved being a ghost.
She loved the freedom to dig into a subject for months instead of minutes.
She loved telling a story over hundreds of pages instead of hundreds of words.
And she really loved getting paid a living wage instead of scrambling to gather freelance peanuts.
Soon ghostwriting made up the bulk of her income, and the agent Kirby Kim, who repped her for the first book she ghostwrote, was helping her find other ghostwriting projects.
But Sarah hadn’t forgotten about Because the Night.
While establishing herself as a ghostwriter to the stars, Sarah revised her novel again and again, but when it was finally polished enough for her to share it with Kirby, he didn’t think the book was a good fit for his list.
But Sarah remained undaunted.
She secured Kirby’s permission to seek an agent for her fiction, and soon she received an offer of representation from an agent who loved Because the Night but believed it would be a small, niche book. And because the market for celebrity ghostwriting was so much more lucrative than the market for debut fiction, this new agent would only represent Sarah if she could represent both Sarah’s fiction and nonfiction.
But as desperately as Sarah wanted to publish a novel, ghostwriting was keeping her afloat, and she valued her working relationship with Kirby, so Sarah made the agonizing decision to say no to the new agent—and representation for Because the Night—and stick with Kirby.
The Rambler
With Kirby as her agent, Sarah would go on to publish 22 books—21 celebrity memoirs and one memoir of her own—and, because publishing a novel was still Sarah’s ultimate dream, she made time to write and revise two more novels, but Kirby didn’t feel either of these new books were worthy of being her debut novel.
Then then over drinks in New York City in the fall of 2016, Kirby made an offhand comment that Sarah should write a thriller about a ghostwriter, an idea that didn’t initially inspire Sarah because she was busy actually ghostwriting and pitching television shows—this was Hollywood, after all. But though Sarah might have entertained the thriller idea after she sold a pilot that ultimately didn’t get produced, instead she was blindsided by breast cancer.
Her prognosis was good—they caught it early, it wasn’t aggressive, and there was a clear treatment protocol—but cancer has a way of forcing you to rethink your priorities.
In June, 2018—just one week after she finished radiation—Sarah started journaling about a ghost writer named Mari, and The Last Days of the Midnight Ramblers was born.
Four years and thirteen7 stubborn drafts later, Sarah sold that book—and the next one—at auction.
When she called to share the news, I was so choked up I time traveled.
I should take a moment to clarify that my nerd brain (mostly) knows that time travel isn’t physically possible—as I understand the physics8 passing through a worm hole that links the present and the past would likely rip a traveler apart atom by atom—but my writer brain knows for a fact that the human heart is, and always will be, a time-traveling fool.
Because the moment that my throat tightened with tears of joy about Sarah’s news, my heart created a wormhole that allowed me to be with Sarah not only as she was on that day in May of 2022—triumphant after more than twenty years of hard work and disappointments—but also as she was on that day twenty-something years ago, a rock star swearing that—like a boy—she’d do everything she could to make her novel dreams come true.
Which—two tenacious decades later—is exactly what that rock star went and did.
Tenacity Tales is HIBOU’s monthly celebration of the tiny tenacities in a writerly life. If you have a tenacity tale you’d like to share, comment below or send me your pitch at hibou@substack.com. To learn more about what we’re looking for, read the original Tenacity Tale here.
The prologue of The Last Days of the Midnight Ramblers:
HOW TO BE A GHOST
Before the how is the why.
Ghosts do it for three reasons: money, access, praise.
Not public praise, of course, on a book jacket, for instance. But the more intimate nod promised in most contracts: the heartfelt note of gratitude, hidden in plain sight, on a star’s acknowledgments page. That’s right, ghosts are guaranteed such a mention in collaboration agreements, a sweetener to deals that, when they disintegrate, are settled via a “kill fee.”
Sometimes a client forgets to mention you, the person who wrote their book. But this sting is private, and there’s an easy fix. You are often the one to draft the thank-yous to the editorial team in the voice you have been occupying for months. Your editor, aware of all the reasons you deserve credit, contractual and otherwise, simply has you add your name to this list.
What you are celebrating is more than your mimicry. It’s the infinite number of moments in which you’ve inferred just who and how to be. That’s the secret to making it as a ghost. Most people think you have to be a great writer, but no one’s claiming to be Chekhov. You don’t need to be the person who best captures the celebrity’s tone, either, although that’s important. Really, it’s about not judging your clients, whether they’re reality TV divorcées on their way to rehab or the biggest rock stars with the deepest secrets, no matter how dark the memories they divulge or how badly they behave from the stress of deciding on deadline how candid to be; the bond is invisible, but ghosts must be capable of meeting their subjects, always, with unconditional love.
They do love you back. Sometimes. And always, it feels that way for a while, in the heady days just before and after submitting the book. Best is when they include their own, genuine and warm shout-out, mention a shared moment or joke, for which the most devoted superfan would line up overnight in the rain. Since ghosts must work in the shadows, and the job is hard and can fall apart even when you do your best, it’s validating to see evidence of your accomplishments in print. As with any form of intimacy, you can’t help but want an emotional souvenir, a way to capture what happened and carry it with you into the rest of your life.
There are other tricks to be mastered, as with any trade. Be patient, be attentive, be clever (be amusing, if possible), be comfortable being wrong (when some celebrities are ornery, they like a foil—those in their inner circle are easy targets). And maybe, just maybe, you’ll maintain your place in the VIP lounge of life. For most ghosts, such perks are enough. They had always been plenty for this one. But that was before the project that almost cost everything, and gave just as much, by revealing another way to be: wake up and seize a life that’s truly lived, which has deeper value than a spotlight, or a book credit, could ever come close to.
There’s always a collaboration like no other. The one that teaches you whether you have what it takes or not. If you dare to step up, ghosting is far more than a job; it’s a vocation. You must risk everything, maybe even your life, certainly your pride, your assumptions about yourself and others, and the stories you tell about who you are and why you matter. If you pull it off, you will know you are woven into every word on the page, even the consciousness of those you have occupied as a ghost. And yet you will still want, maybe even need, to be acknowledged—
It’s proof you exist.
The eye of the professor who taught my undergraduate class in ethics in journalism is twitching so badly it’s registering on the Richter, but it’s not like I’m burying the fact that Sarah’s more family than friend.
Yes, I am going to link to bookshop.com every time I mention the title of Sarah’s book to ensure you have every opportunity to pre-order this phenomenal debut.
The short version is she did some freelance work for the magazine I worked for, but we bonded over the joyous slog of novel writing.
Happy tears for Sarah’s success, not tears of despair for the terrible time travel trope.
Writing concert reviews and profiling rock stars was cool but not lucrative.
The start of our beautiful rock-star-meets-nerd friendship.
As best as a draft can be counted, though honestly it was probably more.
Which is admittedly not well.
Aw, thank you so much for this beautiful tribute, Cathy! I'm incredibly grateful I've had you (and your kind but fierce pep talks) in the trenches with me for all of the years of tenacity it took me to arrive.