As Told To – Détails, épisodes et analyse

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As Told To

As Told To

Daniel Paisner

Arts
Société & Culture

Fréquence : 1 épisode/14j. Total Éps: 115

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Everybody's got a story to tell. Sometimes they need a little bit of help. Veteran ghostwriter Daniel Paisner talks shop with his fellow collaborators and shines a light on what it means to pursue a writing life on the back of someone else's story.
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Episode 102: Gathering of the Ghosts 2025

mardi 16 décembre 2025 • Durée 01:14:57

Join podcast host Daniel Paisner as he moderates a panel discussion at the second annual Gathering of the Ghosts ghostwriting conference earlier this year.  

Dan is joined by former As Told To guests Jodi Lipper, Lisa Dickey, and Ellen Daly, as the veteran collaborators compare notes on craft and process—a fun, spirited, insightful reflection on the very many ways authors and journalists are writing in collaboration. 

Learn more:

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Episode 101: Samantha Rose

mardi 2 décembre 2025 • Durée 01:03:35

"As a ghostwriter, I've trained my ear to listen for what's really there or not there, to discern what's underneath or between someone's words," writes veteran collaborator Samantha Rose, in her stirring, soaring new memoir Giving Up the Ghost: A Daughter's Memoir. "I hear what's implied, what's withheld…"

Samantha's gifts as a storyteller are very much on display in the pages of her new book—a heartbreaking account of her mother's suicide, published earlier this year by Sybilline Press.

An Emmy Award-winning television writer and a New York Times best-selling collaborator, Samantha has written extensively in the areas of spirituality, health and wellness, personal growth and parenting. Her books have been translated into more than 20 foreign languages and have been featured selections of Reese's Book Club and Target's Bookmarked Book Club. 

She is the principal of literary development and the head of client relations for Yellow Sky Media, her boutique editorial agency in Petaluma, Calif.

Learn more about Samantha Rose:

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Episode 94: Ivy Pochoda

mardi 29 juillet 2025 • Durée 58:55

Ivy Pochoda is the author of the critically-acclaimed novels Visitation Street, These Women, Sing Her Down, and the just-published Ecstasy, a reimagined contemporary feminist horror story hailed by the Washington Post as a "stiletto-sharp remake of Euripides." 

She is also the co-author of The New York Times best-selling middle-grade Epoca fantasy series, created by the late basketball legend Kobe Bryant and written under the name Ivy Claire.

Her books have been awarded the L.A. Times Book Prize, the 2018 Strand Critics Award for Best Novel and the Prix Page America in France, and she has been a finalist for the prestigious Edgar Award.

A former collegiate and professional squash player, Ivy has led a creative writing workshop in Skid Row, Los Angeles, and is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California Riverside-Palm Desert low-residency MFA program. 

Writing fiction and playing squash are a lot alike, she says. "Both teach self-reliance and self-motivation. And both practice deception."

Learn more about Ivy Pochoda:

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Episode 14: Andrew Neiderman

mardi 1 mars 2022 • Durée 01:00:34

Andrew Neiderman is perhaps the world's most prolific ghostwriter, and, the most widely-read. Since 1987, he's been writing under the pen name of V.C. Andrews, helping to sustain one of publishing's most successful franchises, following the death of Cleo Virginia Andrews in 1986. Andrews is best-known to millions of readers as the author of Flowers in the Attic, a surprisingly dark family saga that was first published in 1979—a book that now features prominently in many discussions on book banning and cancel culture for its graphic content and its focus on death and imprisonment and incest…not exactly the stuff of school libraries, despite the fact that the book has appealed to young readers for generations.

Neiderman, already an established and widely-published novelist in his own right, was hired by the V.C. Andrews estate to keep writing under name, and he went on to publish over 90 additional titles (including 2021's The Umbrella Lady and Out of the Rain) with no end in sight. He's also written nearly 50 books of his own, including The Devil's Advocate, the basis for the 1997 Taylor Hackford film of the same name, starring Al Pacino, as well as the stage adaptation of "Flowers in the Attic" and numerous screenplays. He is the author of the just-published The Woman Beyond the Attic: The V.C. Andrews Story, a celebration of the life and career of the woman who has been his muse for more than 35 years.

Learn more about Andrew Neiderman:

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Episode 13: Bruce Weber

mardi 15 février 2022 • Durée 01:09:51

Bruce Weber has led a rich and varied writing life. He has been a fiction editor, a magazine editor, a national arts correspondent and theater critic, and a metro reporter…oh, and for good measure, a ghostwriter.

For many years, he wrote obituaries, weighing in with the final word on more than 1,000 notable deaths, which in his hands sprang from the page like notable lives, well and purposefully lived. Attentive listeners might recognize his voice, which was featured prominently (along with the rest of him) in the acclaimed 2016 documentary "Obit," from director Vanessa Gould, which shined compelling light on the men and women on The New York Times obit desk.

A look back at his career reveals a writer with a gift for sharing other people's stories in a way that is truly his own. "I don't think it's self-aggrandizing to say that obituary writing is important work," he wrote in an op-ed piece upon his retirement from the paper of record in 2016. "An obituary is, after all, the first last word on a life, a public assessment of a human being's time on earth, a judgement on what deserves to be remembered."

Before his retirement, Bruce found the time to write a couple of books of his own, including the best-selling As They See 'Em: A Fan's Travels in the Land of Umpires, and Life is a Wheel: Memoirs of a Bike-Riding Obituarist, as well as a book in collaboration with the dancer and choreographer Savion Glover (Savion! My Life in Tap). He is currently at work on a biography of the writer E.L. Doctorow.

Learn more about Bruce Weber:

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Episode 12: Amy Ferris

mardi 1 février 2022 • Durée 01:13:07

Amy Ferris writes like a dream. About love. Also: strength, humanity, depression, aging, inspiration, resilience. But mostly about love. It's kind of her thing—a thing that led her to her first gig as a collaborator, a dual memoir from Joseph "Rev Run" Simmons and Justine Simmons called Old School Love.

Amy's worked primarily as an essayist, an editor, a screenwriter and playwright. She's even published a young adult novel called A Greater Goode. She made a whole bunch of noise with the publication of her 2009 breakout book, Marrying George Clooney: Confessions from a Midlife Crisis, a wildly funny and yet achingly wistful collection of middle-of-the-night musings on life and death and connectedness. (Don't just take our word for it: The New York Times called it "poignant, free-wheeling, cranky and funny.")

The book helped to establish Amy as a voice of her generation and a leading champion of women and women's issues. She is the co-editor of anthology Dancing at the Shame Prom: Sharing the Stories That Kept Us Small, and editor of Shades of Blue: Writers on Depression, Suicide and Feeling Blue, a collection of essays that looked to shine meaningful light on the shadow of depression.

She is a founding board member of the Scranton, PA-based Pages & Places Literary Festival, a co-director of the Story Summit Writer's School, and a frequent guest at writer's conferences and workshops all over the world.

Follow her on Facebook, where she posts almost daily on the stuff of her life and the human condition. Oh, and love...a whole lotta love.

Learn more about Amy Ferris:

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Episode 11: Hilary Liftin

mardi 18 janvier 2022 • Durée 01:13:15

"No one is born a celebrity," notes collaborator Hilary Liftin. As the author or co-author of more than 20 books, including 13 New York Times best-sellers, she knows this as well as anyone. In addition to her work behind-the-scenes helping to pen best-selling memoirs from stars such as Miley Cyrus, Tori Spelling, Mackenzie Phillips and Tatum O'Neil, she's also written three books of her own: Dear Exile, a collection of letters she exchanged with her college roommate while the latter was working for the Peace Corps in rural Kenya; Candy and Me, a memoir told through her lifelong obsession with candy; and the novel Movie Star by Lizzie Pepper, a fictionalized account of a life atop (and, alongside) Hollywood's A-list that Cosmopolitan hailed as "a juicy faux tell-all about the price of fame." "Every book is a puzzle," Hilary says of her collaborative projects. "My authors have the pieces. I help put them together."

Learn more about Hilary Liftin:

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Episode 10: Michael Jan Friedman

mardi 4 janvier 2022 • Durée 01:22:39

Michael Jan Friedman is one of the most successful sci-fi and fantasy writers on the planet—although in Mike's case we should probably specify the planet. Most of Mike's early work centered in and around the Star Trek universe, as the writer of novelizations based on the show and its many spin-offs. He's the author of the first "Star Trek: The Next Generation" hardcover, Reunion, which became a New York Times best-seller; and, co-writer of the acclaimed second-season "Star Trek: Voyager" episode, "Resistance." He's also written tie-in books for several other DC Comics and Marvel franchises, including the Aliens, Predator, and X-Men series, as well as more than 150 comics, most of them for DC, where he created the popular Darkstar comic book series.

In all, Mike's written or co-written more than 70 books, including 11 New York Times best-sellers.

Somewhere along the way, to fill the spaces between comics and novelizations, he tried his hand at ghostwriting, most notably with the New York Times best-selling Hollywood Hulk Hogan, written with the famed wrestler, and Ghost Hunting, written with Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson of the Syfy channel's "Ghost Hunters" series. He also became a New York City public school teacher, finding time to write in the evenings and on weekends—ticking yet another box on the checklist of a writing life.

Together with a group of seven fellow science fiction writers, he founded Crazy 8 Press, where he continues to publish his original fiction.

Learn more about Michael Jan Friedman:

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Episode 9: Robert Sabbag

mardi 14 décembre 2021 • Durée 01:33:25

Veteran journalist and author Robert Sabbag joins the podcast to share the story behind the story of one of the greatest books ever written about drug smuggling—Snowblind: A Brief Career in the Cocaine Trade, a classic example of collaborative memoir that helped to establish him as one of the most esteemed chroniclers of his generation. No less an authority on these matters than Hunter S. Thompson hailed Sabbag on the book's publication as "a whip-song writer," leading our guest to a long career as a "whip-song" contributor to Rolling Stone, Men's Journal, Playboy, New York magazine, The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, and other publications. 

Along the way, he also found time to work as a true ghostwriter on a couple of notable business memoirs, and to write the books Smokescreen: A True Adventure, Too Tough to Die, and Down Around Midnight: A Memoir of Crash and Survival. Sabbag is the co-writer of the film "Witness Protection," based on his New York Times Magazine cover story "The Invisible Family," which was nominated for two Golden Globe Awards, including Best Picture.

Join host Daniel Paisner as he visits with his longtime friend to discuss his classic debut effort—"one of the most dazzling and spectacular pieces of reporting I have ever read," according to the late screenwriter and novelist Nora Ephron. How Robert Sabbag got that story is must-listening for all writers…and readers. 

Visit Robert Sabbag's website

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Episode 8: William Novak

mardi 30 novembre 2021 • Durée 01:13:33

"William Novak had the career I hadn't even known I wanted," host Daniel Paisner says of this episode's guest, who for a time seemed to have his have his hand in every major celebrity autobiography on bookstore shelves.

Starting with the publication of the genre-defining best-seller Iacocca, by Lee Iacocca—the best-selling book of 1984 and 1985—Novak embarked on a string of collaborations on some of the biggest books of the next decade, including Earvin "Magic" Johnson's My Life, Nancy Reagan's My Turn, Lt. Colonel Oliver North's Under Fire, and Tip O'Neill's Man of the House. In fact, Novak was so busy during this period that he actually turned down the opportunity to work with both Ronald Reagan and Nelson Mandela—an astonishing turn for a writer who candidly admits he was a little out of his element when he got the Iacocca assignment, as he struggled to realize that his job was not to write about Iacocca, as a journalist might, but to help the former Chrysler chairman "write the book about himself, based on how he sees himself." 

Join us on this episode of As Told To: The Ghostwriting Podcast as we visit with the writer who helped to bring the work of the ghostwriter out of the shadows and into the light. 

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