The Ghostwriter

“I love the anonymity of ghostwriting, the ability to slip into someone else’s skin and inhabit their life just long enough to tell a good story. No one can see who I am or remember who my father is. I’m an invisible hand on the page instead of the name on the cover.”

Olivia’s avoidant personality underpins her motivation for her career choice. By inhabiting the lives of her writing subjects, she can escape the difficult truths of her life. She alludes to this when she mentions that ghostwriting stops people from remembering her relation to her father. This implies the negative impact that being Vincent’s daughter has on her life.

“Because this book has to be a ruse; my father has been churning out novels for decades, and he certainly doesn’t need my help to do it. I will view it as a necessary evil to move past this phase of my life—to stave off the overdraft notices arriving almost daily on my phone. To pay what I owe to both John Calder and my attorney. And perhaps to also get some closure with a man who has been virtually unknown to me my entire life.”

In this passage, Olivia states her objectives and the obstacles that keep her from accomplishing them. She needs to escape debt and seek closure from her estranged father, but her major obstacle is the possibility that Vincent is planning to harm her. This fear reduces the chances that she may ever obtain closure and positions Vincent as an antagonist.

“Despite his many flaws, I don’t believe the man I once worshipped could be a murderer. But fame and trauma turned a once loving father into one I barely recognized. Habits became addictions and the father I knew disappeared, replaced by a man who consistently let me down.”

Early in the novel, Olivia establishes that her estrangement from Vincent isn’t caused by his reputation, but by his toxic behavior as a father. These dynamics set up the tension in Olivia’s emotional arc: Whenever she finds new evidence, she starts to believe that her father may be a killer. Later, she realizes that the evidence doesn’t definitively establish Vincent’s role in the killings. Instead, she may be using the evidence to justify her desire to avoid confronting Vincent.

“My father had a gift for creating fun in a life where money was tight and friends were few.”

An important aspect of Olivia and Vincent’s relationship is that Olivia can recall a time when Vincent made a positive impact in her life. Jack will argue in Chapter 25 that this is the very reason he cannot accept that Vincent is a killer. His denial resonates with Olivia’s experience of Vincent’s kindness and makes her doubt Vincent’s guilt.

“But Poppy would have been only nineteen years old when I was born. A fun, young aunt, teaching me how to roller-skate. Braiding my hair. Taking me on fun shopping excursions to Santa Barbara or Ventura, giving my parents a night off.

Who would she have become, if her life hadn’t ended at age fourteen? I close my laptop and stare at the four walls surrounding me, the boxes towering nearly to the ceiling in places, letting myself feel the loss of someone I never had a chance to love.”

This passage establishes Olivia’s personal stakes in the mystery of the Taylor murders. Although she is estranged from Vincent, she is compelled to solve the mystery for the sake of her aunt, Poppy, who could have served as a surrogate for her absent mother. Olivia sees similarities between herself and Poppy, and this strengthens Olivia’s desire to seek justice for her.

“Everyone is an unreliable narrator…But someone who has killed another person? They are the ultimate gaslighters. You begin to question everything—even the things you can see to be true.”

This passage cements an important idea related to The Tension Between Truth and Memory, one of the novel’s major themes. Olivia recalls a colleague who described killers as unreliable people. As the suspicions around Vincent’s guilt shift to other characters, like Danny and Mr. Stewart, Olivia’s trust in him grows, allowing her to divulge more of the evidence she has uncovered. Importantly, the passage stresses that everyone is unreliable, including Olivia herself. The passage emphasizes the need for Olivia to set aside her biases and trust her instincts.

“I’d act out, but Danny would travel inward, to a place no one could reach. You have to understand, our family wasn’t an easy one. We had a father who was emotionally unavailable and a mother who was constantly complaining about us to others, often while we were standing right there.”

This passage underscores The Cycle of Inherited Trauma. Both Olivia and Vincent have experienced childhood trauma at the hands of their parents. While Olivia does not empathize with Vincent at first, his traumatic past drives his behavior toward her: Unable to resolve his past, he passes those traumas on to Olivia, replicating the circumstances in which he grew up.

“‘Can’t you just write what they want you to write and be done?’

‘It’s not that simple,’ I explain. ‘I can’t write things that are outright fabrications. I’d get slaughtered, and I can’t afford another hit to my reputation. The problem is, I can’t figure out what’s true and what’s not.’”

This passage underscores Olivia’s professional integrity, which is one of her key character traits. Tom suggests that Olivia could take the easy way out of the job, if only to save herself from debt. Olivia rejects this, believing that it would make her no better than her industry rivals, like John Calder. Later in the novel, Vincent exposes Calder for falsifying details in his ghostwriting projects.

“All the other kids are obsessed with him as well; the cool, young PE teacher everyone hopes to get. The one kids can relate to. Talk to. Walking around campus in his shorts and T-shirt, kids following him like an entourage. It’s all I can do not to throw up.”

This passage characterizes Mr. Stewart, who presents himself as a hip and dependable adult. He blends into the milieu of the high school, despite being a teacher among students. The novel plays into contemporary anxieties about imbalanced power dynamics in academic settings to raise suspicion around Mr. Stewart’s character. Although none of the characters initially suspect Mr. Stewart, the passage is signaling the reader to pay close attention to this character.

“But film won’t lie the way memories do. I want a record of things that happen so people can’t brush off my feelings and tell me I’m overreacting, or I don’t understand…If I can film it, people will see what I see, and they will believe me.”

In this passage, Clark establishes Poppy’s Super 8 camera as an important motif for The Tension Between Truth and Memory. Poppy wants to capture compelling truths that she sees every day, which other people tend to disregard because they do not take her thoughts as a young girl seriously. The camera allows Poppy’s skeptics to see the truth as she sees it, rather than rely exclusively on how they remember it.

“I would never allow my daughter to live in a house with someone who’d done something so horrific. That should tell you everything you need to know.”

Clark subtly foreshadows the answer to the mystery by making Lydia deliver this line in a brief flashback. In the context of Danny’s murder by Lydia, this statement explains why Lydia chose to withdraw from her family. The guilt and trauma over what she had done made her feel unreliable around Olivia, causing her to live in isolation.

“Ojai exists as a bubble in my life. Everything and everyone who knows the truth lives inside of it, and I’m not afraid of speaking about it here. Confident I can keep it contained.”

Olivia describes Ojai as a “bubble,” which explains why she can open up to Jack but not to Tom. Jack enters the narrative already knowing Olivia’s story and how her father’s reputation impacted her life. Tom, by contrast, likely has questions about Olivia’s childhood that she wants to avoid. When she is in Ojai with Jack, she knows Jack won’t ask her about it. Because Jack knows Olivia so well, he intuits that she is lying about her childhood to the world outside Ojai.

“I’d always believed my father had invented Lionel Foolhardy, until he’d presented me with evidence to the contrary. There’s a reason historians rely so heavily on primary sources. Because human memory is flawed.”

This passage underscores The Tension Between Truth and Memory by emphasizing that both Olivia and Vincent are unreliable. Olivia’s revelation that her memory is wrong awakens her to the need for objective evidence. Acknowledging her unreliability levels her with Vincent, and she accepts that Vincent isn’t always wrong in his assertions and recollections.

“The one thing Tom has always insisted on, I’ve violated. It doesn’t matter that I told him the lie before I knew how much I would grow to love him. I can see now that it won’t matter to him that it’s a story I tell everyone, that I’m not deceiving him alone.”

In this passage emphasizes The Personal Cost of Secrets. When Tom discovers the truth about Olivia’s assignment, he becomes upset, realizing that Olivia lied to him. Olivia’s excuse that she lied before she could anticipate Tom’s importance in her life suggests how little thought she’d given to the idea of keeping her past a secret from him. The fact that she maintained that lie suggests that Olivia continues to think little of Tom, which is what triggers his ire. Tom is supposed to be the person Olivia trusts most, yet her secrets prove that he isn’t.

“All these years, I’ve thought the story I told people about my family was harmless. But now I can see that I’m no different from my father, omitting everything that feels painful or complicated. I’m beginning to realize that once you lie about your past, you wall yourself off from the present.”

Olivia realizes the parallels between her and Vincent’s behavior that perpetuate The Cycle of Inherited Trauma. When each generation avoids dealing with these emotions, the emotions become more difficult to confront. Vincent’s isolation and Olivia’s lies come from the same desire to protect themselves but have negative consequences for those around them.

“Reasonable doubt is like a bell—once rung, you can’t unring it.”

District Attorney Charles Monahan makes this statement about doubt, which resonates with Olivia’s skepticism over the evidence that suggests that Vincent is a killer. Although the evidence hints at Vincent’s violent tendencies, Olivia knows that Vincent is innocent. This knowledge is what Monahan refers to as “reasonable doubt,” a sensibility that Olivia cannot shake, even despite the mounting evidence.

“‘I could never reconcile the man I knew with a killer.’ He shakes his head. ‘How could the guy who used to insist on ice cream sundaes for breakfast, who taught me how to tie a necktie, be the same person who murdered his siblings?’ His voice grows quieter. ‘Your dad was a mess, but he always seemed to know when I needed him to get his shit together and step in. It’s like he intuited when my own father was struggling and just quietly gave me what I needed.’”

Jack reinforces Olivia’s doubt by reminding her of Vincent’s best qualities. This complicates the character of Vincent by making him redeemable. Although Olivia has looked at Vincent as an antagonist, this passage marks a turning point that makes it impossible for her to see him as an antagonist.

“After that, treasure hunts became our thing. Not just for birthdays, but for everyday things as well […] It’s how we communicated with each other, little notes and messages tucked into a binder, or a pair of shoes, or between my pillow and my bedsheet.”

This passage cements the treasure hunt as a symbol of the warmth that Vincent carries on from his relationship with Poppy into his relationship with Olivia. Vincent expresses his love for both Poppy and Olivia by testing their wits and rewarding them for their skills, allowing both girls to outsmart him and read into his affectionate intentions.

“What ghosts might come to me—not just those of my aunt and uncle, but of the person I might have been had none of this happened? What kind of friend could I have been? What kind of partner to Tom?”

Breaking The Cycle of Inherited Trauma involves Olivia reckoning with the life she could have led in the absence of that trauma. This points to her awareness of the impact her family’s trauma has had on her life. Olivia regrets how deeply her avoidant behavior, her father’s emotional abuse, and her mother’s abandonment have affected her life that she fantasizes about how differently her life would have been without those influences.

“Information is power. It’s never wrong to seek the answers you need.”

Mr. Stewart encourages Olivia by giving her a semblance of power. Actually, Mr. Stewart has leveraged information to disadvantage others, as he does when he uses his knowledge of Taylors to kill Poppy, convince Vincent and Lydia to include him in their alibi, and avoid suspicion. This establishes Mr. Stewart as a manipulative person, who seeks answers to maintain power over others.

“‘You want me to be vulnerable, but you can’t even do that yourself.’

‘I’m not the one who has to write a memoir,’ I shoot back.

‘No, you just have to live your life. And you’ll live it alone if you can’t figure out how to be honest.’”

In this exchange, Vincent challenges Olivia to be better than him. Olivia deflects by restricting their conversation to the memoir, but Vincent makes it clear that he is warning her about her future. Vincent is also acknowledging The Personal Cost of Secrets.

“[You] can make up whatever you want to be the truth and you can live your life as if you’ve sealed it off forever. But, like a heartbeat behind a wall, the truth is always there, holding you hostage. I’m no different from my parents—refusing to acknowledge or speak about difficult things. And yet, I’m this way because I was raised to be this way. Their weaknesses are my own.”

This passage ties two themes together: The Cycle of Inherited Trauma and The Personal Cost of Secrets. Olivia realizes that avoidance will not solve her problems and acknowledges that she can never escape the truth about her childhood, no matter how often or how well she lies about it.

“Danny. I always thought he’d killed Poppy because of the baby. Because he thought Poppy was going to tell. […] I hated him for years, knowing what he’d done to your mother. Believing he’d been the one to kill Poppy. It felt righteous and white-hot and pure. […] But now I have to rearrange all of it in my mind. Learn how to think about Danny in a different way. To allow myself to give space to what had been done to him. To what he had to carry for so long. […] It’s not an excuse for what he did to your mother. I’ll never forgive him for that. But it gives those actions context. He was just a child.”

This passage represents a confrontation between Vincent and Danny, even after Danny’s death. Vincent resolves his grudge by understanding how Danny survived abuse and struggled with it. The resolution comes from Vincent reckoning with his grudge, signaling that Danny’s antagonism became an internal struggle that Vincent worked through for years after Danny’s death.