“Ghosted” with Nancy French – Part 1
Join us for a compelling two-part conversation with author, ghostwriter, and investigative journalist Nancy French. In this episode, Nancy shares some of her story – from growing up in the impoverished foothills of the Appalachian Mountains to meeting her now-husband, journalist David French, and spontaneously moving to New York and beginning her career as ghostwriter for numerous books by conservative political leaders, including five that hit the New York Times bestselling list.
Stay tuned for part two in which Nancy talks about the deeply personal investigative journalism project that changed the course of her career and her life.
Listener discretion is advised: This two-part discussion includes discussion of child abuse, particularly sexual abuse, suicide, and some coarse language.
About Our Guest:
Nancy French has collaborated on multiple books for celebrities – five of which made the New York Times best seller list – and written books under her own name. She has conducted a multi-year journalistic investigation, written commentary, and published for the nation’s most prominent newspapers and magazines.
She lives in Franklin, Tennessee with her husband – journalist David French – and family.
You can pick up her new book, Ghosted: An American Story, available wherever books are sold.
Episode Transcript:
Dan: I think you’ve heard me say a number of times that we love the privilege of interviewing folks that just absolutely intrigue us. And today, oh my goodness, I would say we are maybe at the top of the Himalayas with regard to a person and a presence that is just staggering in intrigue. So let me introduce Nancy French and say, Nancy, so thrilled you are with us. And I’ll tell the audience a little bit about you. But what we’re going to step into is maybe one of the most compelling memoirs I’ve ever read, and to say your life is complex and broken and bizarre and beautiful. I think maybe the greatest comment I can offer is this passage out of 2 Corinthians 4:10, where Paul says, I live every day in my body, the death of Jesus, so that I might also live in my body, the life of Jesus. And I look at that passage of the interplay of death and resurrection and say that I long to live that. But seldom do we all come close. I’ll just say, dear friend, you are one of those people who I think if you were to look at that passage with photos, yours would be there. So you are a New York Times bestselling author, ghostwriter of five major works that have been on that particular scale, an investigative reporter, a scintillating writer, essayist in terms of the book that we’re going to be talking about, Ghosted, all that to say you’re pretty wild, woman.
Nancy: These are some accolades. I like it. I love it. Thanks for having me on. This is so fun.
Dan: Well, again, the dilemma is sometimes I get accused, rarely, of being somewhat hyperbolic, but nothing of what I’ve said bears any hyperbole. You want to confirm that, Rachael?
Rachael: I confirm, but let it the best way.
Nancy: Let the record show. I appreciate hyperbole when it comes to compliments of me.
Dan: Well, I can be hyperbolic, but nothing I’ve done and said, so I know we’re interviewing you. But before we do that, Rachael, when you read Ghosted, what in the World was,
Rachael: I say Ah, because I felt like in many ways though, we have very different stories. There was so much of what you touched on that was so relatable to my world, my upbringing, even the fact that a lot of the investigative journalism that you do, that you talk about in Ghosted involves a cap that I actually worked at for a season.
Nancy: Oh, wow.
Rachael: And have my own stories of harm that played out in my particular context of that camp. So there was just, I think Dan, your words like bizarre, beautiful, broken, and just so human-sized. And I just think sometimes we need more human-sized stories, especially in this world that is so polarized in a way that actually leads to a lot of dehumanizing and stripping of face and erasure and just a lot of invitation to violence. So I just appreciated the vulnerability and the courage in which you let some of the bizarre be there in ways that I actually, in my work with people find makes room for the bizarre in our own stories that a lot of people, because they can’t tend to that in their own stories, can’t make space for. So I’m just deeply appreciative.
Nancy: Oh, that’s so nice. I cannot believe you worked there. How fascinating.
Rachael: Yeah.
Dan: Well, we’ll get to the camp eventually, but just to start with, talk a little bit about the book Ghosted and what it means to be a ghost writer, and how in the name of God have you, it’s really, I just kind of go, how have you lived your life? You have lived so many lives in one young life.
Nancy: I know. I feel like I’ve lived 20 lives. It’s crazy. But yeah, so most people don’t realize that almost all celebrity books are ghost written by people like me, just obscure people who toil without any sort of recognition or you don’t see ’em on the book tours or anything like that. It’s just their job. It’s just like a nine to five. But you’re working pretty much around the clock to meet unimaginable deadlines. But you get to write books for really interesting people and celebrities and athletes and leaders and politicians. And so for a long time I did that. I had so much fun. I really consider it a sacred obligation and honor to tell people’s stories. So I’ve worked with people, very prominent people in the GOP, including Ann Romney, Sarah Palin. I lived in Sarah Palin’s house for a month. I worked for Ben Sasse who was a senator, governor’s, leaders, whatever. I was really ensconced into the GOP. And then after that, I also got ensconced in Hollywood, like reality TV stars like Sean Lowe, the Bachelor, Kim Kardashian. I’ve done a lot of projects with a lot of different people, and I’ve had a lot of fun doing it.
Dan: Just that’s nuts. I mean, in some ways you are a therapist translator taking people’s stories and shall we say, telling them in a way that allows the essence and the complexity of a person’s life to be told. You’ve thought of yourself as sort of a therapist?
Nancy: I do not, but I did read this book called To Be Told, and I’m not even kidding, it revolutionized the way that I approached the whole thing. So I’m trying not to be starstruck dear listeners by Dan Allender right now. But over the years, you really have informed my storytelling. In fact, the way I did not approach it until I read your materials in the way that I do and the way that I approach it now, is that I always sit down with them and I say, we are not spin doctors. We’re not trying to protect your reputation. We’re not trying to get you out of anything. We’re just trying to document what God is already doing in your life. And so we’re just recording it. And so anyway, it sort of changes the tenor. I did not approach book writing and storytelling in the correct way until I read your books To Be Told was actually mind blowing to me because I mean, you were able to infuse the spirituality of your story, like the importance of your story and tying it to God in a way that was just very beautiful. So from that point forward, when I sat down with my clients, I would say, we are not spinning your story. We are documenting what God is doing in your life. God is writing their story. We’re just conduits of that.
Dan: That’s such a gracious
Nancy: No, it is honest.
Dan: That’s why as an investigative reporter, writer, ghost writer, but you are a reader and a seer of the world and of people’s hearts, and that’s been part of your story. It’s such a brilliant part of the beginning of ghosted as you talk about your family of origin and really being named by people within your family as a seer. So I’d love for you to put words to being a seer and how that got confirmed in the context of your family.
Nancy: So I grew up in rural Tennessee, rural Kentucky, but my family was from Monteagle Mountain in the foothills of the Appalachians, and they were hillbilly. And my grandmother, they used the word Indian. So that’s what I’ll use. We have a lot of Indian blood and just a really wonderful family. However, they were colorful. One of was a soothsayer, a psychic, so she had a crystal ball and she would invite people from all over the area to come and she would read their fortunes and just lots of violence. Like my cousin, one of my cousins shot another cousin’s arm off and lots of death, lots of death and drunkenness and just all the stereotypical things you think about hillbillies. And so the thing that interested me was always this psychic stuff. And I know that I should not, that’s not the type of thing that good Christian people are supposed to be attracted to, but what the heck? My aunt would have this crystal ball and people would look in it and then they’d give her money. That’s cool. And so I was eight, and so I wanted to know about that. At the same time, at church, you are admonished, do not even touch a Ouija board. Do not. So to me, there was this element of I know I’m not supposed to be knowing about this. And so one day when my aunt was reading someone’s fortune or she was waiting for them to come, she asked me to sit on her lap. And I looked into the crystal ball and she was like, what do you see? And she told me that she believed that I was a seer. And I was like, I had all this pressure. I wanted to be spiritually impressive. So I looked into the ball and all I saw were prisms, but I didn’t have the words for prism. So I said, rainbows. And she was like, yes, that’s exactly right. There are rainbows. And I said, but what do you see? And she said, I see dollar signs. And I was so disappointed. I thought she would say something really amazing, nice or insightful. The hidden truths of the universe would be spelled out to me on Monteagle Mountain. But alas, it was just regrettably, just dollar signs. But she said to me that she believed that I was a seer, and they frequently had these conversations with my other family members and they’d say, she’s what? She’s like us. She’s one of our family. She looks like us. She talks like us, and she has the gift. So my whole life I’ve sort of been, I don’t know what the right word is, haunted might be the right word, but you feel like, okay, do I have some sort of special power to see something? And over the course of my life, I’ve had some very mysterious stuff happen. And so I did not want this book to be theologically tidy because I do not know anything about theology. I read the Bible, I think I’m on my fifth time right now, but I do not understand God. I do not understand anything that happens. And so I just wanted to be honest as I reflected on, okay, this stuff happened, I will leave it to smarter people than I to figure out why.
Dan: Well, just to say it is such a theologically rich book because you tap into the reality of how story ties us not only to one another, but to something of the wild, wild glory of God. So at least in the reading, you were already divided early on. Your father and your mom were in one sense of that world, but had left that world but not entirely. And therefore, in one sense, more fundamentalist Christian context had a certain critique of the world, which they came from, but you were in some wild way bridging those worlds. So is it fair to say that you’ve always lived in between?
Nancy: I have felt that way. I’ve always felt very cognizant of the spiritual realm. Always. I’ve been interested in it. I feel like I’ve seen things. I feel like even on the mountain, I feel I can feel different presence, a different presence. And in fact, my cousin, my cousin Little Bill came to my house in Franklin, Tennessee. So that doesn’t seem very far geographically. It’s just a couple of hours, but it’s a million miles culturally. And so he drove up to my house and he called me and he was like, he goes, is this your house? I’m not coming in. And I was like, why? So? And I was like, Little Bill come into my house. And he was like, no, I don’t want to come in. So I go out to the car and he’s sitting in the car and he has his hands on his head, and he was like, do you hear that? And I was like, do I hear what he goes, do you hear those voices? And I was like, voices of what? He goes, I can hear the Confederate soldiers. Was there a battle here then? Of course there was a battle here. The Battle of Franklin, the whole city of Franklin is a battleground, but he was like, can you hear this? Can you hear this? And he could hear it. And I was like, I don’t hear that Little Bill. But I 100% believed that he could and it made sense. So when I’m on the mountain, stuff like that would happen constantly. People, you’d be more apt for someone to come up to you and tell you their fortune or to give you advice about breastfeeding according to the lunar calendar than you would to have a conversation about politics.
Dan: Well, using that theme in between, is it a fair category to say you’ve been living in between worlds all your life, including what you’re doing, even as a ghost writer?
Nancy: Yeah, I think so. And I think I use the word ghosted for the title of the book, because I don’t fit into any category and the categories that I have fit into I’ve been shoved out rather unc unceremoniously. So I feel like I’m writing this book for a lot of people around America who feel spiritually, culturally, politically homeless. I feel like there’s a lot of us maybe, I mean, I don’t know, dozens, at least.
Dan: Dozens. Well, I would see three on this podcast.
Nancy: We could form our own commune. And be accepting maybe.
Dan: I’m curious what you’re hearing, Rachael, particularly because I know you’ve been in-betweener
Rachael: Yeah, I was just trying to think. I think in some ways, being in between sometimes brings a lot of fragmentation. So I was probably feeling some fragmentation in my body of imagining just the disparate worlds and the disparate places and the things that you see that others don’t want to see in the in-between and what it costs. I think because it’s a lot of a lonely, it can be very lonely in the in-between that question of belonging. So when I hear you saying people who feel like they’re searching for a place to belong, and in our world right now to belong looks like a lot of fundamentalism across the board, even though there’s righteous need to speak to injustice and to tell the truth in places where people are spinning a lot of disinformation. And one of the biggest tragedies of our time right now is most people don’t believe there is a truth or that you will ever have access to it, which is kind of such a pendulum swing of there is this absolute truth and this certainty, and you can find it if you just look the right way or think the right way. So I think that feeling of displacement in the in-between is very real and the disorientation, it can also lend itself to a kind of integrity that does make you feel less insane in the midst of a lot of insanity. But I know for so many of us in our stories, especially as young children, we take in that insanity and make meaning of it in a way that usually indicts us as the broken things or the broken people or the ones who we don’t belong for a good reason. And it really takes a long time into adulthood. And I saw that in your story, this sense of really having to come to a greater awareness, a deeper compassion, a deeper healing, a deeper understanding in ways that your young heart, body and mind just took in so much carnage that really was the brokenness and the shame and the violation of the people around you and most of them adults.
Dan: And important, at least for me to add that as the interplay of, as you describe, of great loss, death, sexual abuse, the reality of being in some ways given a reality that can’t be lived because it’s not reality. And yet having to live that reality, particularly in the school that you went to in the beginning of the relationship with your husband, there is just, again, I keep coming back to this, the story is so compelling because in part there is such freedom in naming your brokenness, but with it, I’m sure you’ve been told this multiple times, there is a humor that you bring that is so built on the resurrection. It is not a humor that is sarcastic or violating or dismissive, but to me it’s the laughter of I live in my body every day, the life of Jesus. So keep coming back to this question for you as to how do you look at a life like yours? I know you live it, but you are also a writer, therefore you also have that distance to be able to, in some sense, write a life in a memoir. So interpret your life for us.
Nancy: I have no idea. It’s literally the craziest, I have the sequence of such crazy things that I had to leave out such big things. My publisher was like, it’s too distracting. No one will buy that all of this happened to you, but it’s just been so crazy. And I remember being a kid and my parents were hillbillies, and I was growing up in rural Tennessee, and nothing much happened. And I just remember thinking, I would like to have an interesting life. And man, that has come true. And it’s just so crazy, but so meaningful. And I’m so thankful now because I feel like my big problem or my pain writing the book was at the very beginning, there was just so much trauma. It was hard to write it in such a way so that readers didn’t get put off by it. But in my actual life, I feel very, I don’t know, thankful. I have so much gratitude because I met a wonderful guy 29 years ago almost, and everything changed. When I meet David French in whatever chapter, the book changes tonally, but my life changed tonally, and I will never ever take that for granted. I just am so thankful. So the process of writing the book, all of the trauma that preceeded, I mean, and there’s a lot of trauma that happens after meeting David, but when you have somebody by your side that is so wonderful, you can sort of face things together, not only in the future but the past. So anyway, I just feel thankful.
Rachael: Yeah.
Dan: Well, and again, this story is so compelling and so long to just even begin to tell the story would be a whole episode, a whole 30, 40 minute episode. So I’m going to abbreviate it that in the bizarre meeting over the phone, talking about whether or not to go to the particular school that he was at that moment promoting, and then years later running into one another in the midst of really a dark moment on a sidewalk and then beginning a relationship that lasted for only a few weeks before basically you got engaged and then set two parameters. One was, I want to get married in Paris, and I want to live essentially in Manhattan or New York. Oh my God.
Nancy: It’s like, why? I don’t know. It’s so weird. David proposed. Dan, I could tell it was spontaneous because he did not have a ring, namely. But he was like, yeah, will you marry me? And I hadn’t even been paying attention to him because he was waxing eloquent about love, and my mind was wandering, and I paid attention when he said, I guess the question that I wanted to ask you is, will you marry me? And I was like, okay, there’s no ring, but I think this is serious. And so now I pray more about finding a parking spot at Walmart than I did about marrying this random stranger. But I said, sure, I’ll marry you. But I had these two random conditions. I’d never been to France, I’d never been to New York. I don’t know why I said it. It just sounded like the type of thing that a recent graduate from Harvard Law School might like in a future wife. And I was from Paris, Tennessee. We were redneck, hillbilly, white trash. And so I was trying to act more sophisticated than I was. So David would like me and it worked.
Dan: Or to make conditions that would almost be impossible for any reasonable human being to fulfill.
Nancy: Right? And David was like, sure, we’ll do that. And I was like, okay.
Dan: So that gives us both a glimpse into you as well as him. And let’s just say the name David French. If you do not know is a name you should know because as a essayist, as a writer, New York Times as well as The Atlantic and many other publications, David is a voice of such depth and reason and what I would call compelling conservative, but yet deeply disruptive to structures that need to be exposed. Both of you are seers. Both of you create profound disruption in the world. And again, this is not an accusation. It’s actually quite a compliment. And that is the two of you may be one of the most hated couples in America.
Nancy: Yes. Whereas as popular as head lice.
Dan: So to be able to say, what have you done? Because hatred has been a huge part of your life, a huge part of what has brought you to be who you are, but also the long history of being silenced. And if we can, what we’ll just say to folks is take a break. Go. Go get a snack, lay down on the couch. Maybe more importantly, go to Amazon and order the book Ghosted and come back. Because I want to come back to those two themes that the two of you, but you have been deeply hated and you have been silenced in many worlds. And you have indeed, thankfully, refused to let your voice be lost in the mire of the kind of draconian hatred that you have had to bear. How have you done it? Where have you done it? And what has it brought to you and to others? So have a break. We’ll be right back.