A different story unfolds

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/09/2017 (2947 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Despite his landslide NDP leadership victory last Saturday, it hasn’t been a good week for Wab Kinew and his credibility as a man or a politician.

And it wasn’t going to get any better when I tried to reach him at week’s end.

I had heard a rumour — first from a local author and then from an Indigenous acquaintance — that Kinew’s Canadian No.1 bestselling 2015 book, his tell-all, mea culpa, apologetic memoir The Reason You Walk that details his journey from troubled to changed man, really hadn’t been written by him.

That he had a ghost writer.

Ordinarily, that wouldn’t be a surprise, let alone be newsworthy; business people, politicians and celebrities routinely engage professional wordsmiths to help write their books.

With or without credit to the professional.

The issue is Kinew has taken full credit — and all the award-ceremony bows — as the lone author of a book that wouldn’t have won reviewers’ and readers’ praise unless it was written in an engaging style. And being bright, articulate and a former broadcast journalist, most people had little reason to question that Kinew could be a good, even gifted, author, whose manuscript probably only required what they all do; the here-and-there touch of publishing house editors.

So, in an effort to find the truth, I Googled “Wab Kinew ghost writer.”

And up came John Lawrence Reynolds and the words “ghost writing.”

“John has been called ‘Canada’s best and busiest ghost writer’ (the National Post),” his website read. Below that was a list of some of the “co-authors and publishers who have drawn on John’s writing and major editing skills.”

And there, at the bottom, next to Justin Trudeau (Common Ground, HarperCollins), was Kinew (The Reason You Walk, Penguin-Random House).

But how much “ghost writing” or “major editing” did Reynolds do?

On Tuesday, I emailed Penguin Canada, as it’s also known. I had some questions. I’m still waiting for an answer. Then I left a request with Reynolds’ agent. No response. Finally, late Thursday afternoon, I called Kinew’s spokesman, Rorie McLeod Arnould, and asked for comment from Kinew.

Did Kinew write his own book?

At the outset, McLeod Arnould’s tone was disdainful, as if I wanted to know if his boss had remembered to brush his teeth that morning. Until I added that Kinew’s book was listed on a ghost writer’s website. Abruptly, Arnould’s attitude changed. He said he would get back to me.

While I was waiting, I got lucky.

Reynolds home number is listed on Canada 411. His wife called him to the phone, and after introducing myself, I asked Reynolds if he had ghost-written Kinew’s book.

“I did,” he said.

“I’ve got a knack for hearing the subject’s voice and writing in that voice,” he would go on to tell me.

“He’d given me kind of the core of the structure,” he added.

“And when I wrote the book, I could hear his voice in my head.”

Before that, though, he listened to Kinew on CBC radio.

“Which is what you need to do to make it sound like the author.”

Initially, Kinew had submitted what he had written to Penguin Canada publishing director Diane Turbide.

Reynolds described what was handed to Turbide differently than the “core of a structure.” He said it arrived as an “unpublishable manuscript.”

Turbide was “up against it,” he said, and wanted Reynolds’ help.

“‘Can you do this in the right amount of time?’” Reynolds recalled Turbide asking.

As it turned out, Reynolds said it took him two or three months to “shape it into a publishable book.”

Part of the deal, though, Reynolds said, was his agreeing to “deep-ghosting” the book. That’s “deep” as in uncredited and ultimately reduced to a blur of names at the back of the book that Kinew lumped together as his “many new friends in the publishing industry.” Turbide among them.

I was just getting to asking Reynolds about his work on Trudeau’s book — the prime minister also reduced Reynolds to a uncredited name in the acknowledgments — when Reynolds’ other phone rang at his home. It was “Diane,” he said.

I told Reynolds his publishing director friend was likely calling because, after I contacted Kinew’s spokesman, Kinew must have called her to discuss their awkward situation.

Reynolds promised to let me know and hung up.

When he called back, I asked Reynolds if I was right about why Turbide had been calling him.

“Probably,” he said.

And suddenly, after his discussion with the publisher, something had changed.

He was calling himself a “doctor” rather than a ghost writer. “The manuscript exists, but it needs doctoring.”

Emergency surgery, judging by the way Reynolds originally described it as “unpublishable.”

Later, perhaps having been alerted to the controversy swirling around Manitoba’s new Opposition leader — or more likely because I had asked Penguin Canada if it had fact-checked the criminal case elements of the book — Reynolds volunteered what sounded like a personal disclaimer.

“I want to make something clear,” he said. “That what’s in that book, in terms of facts, weren’t inserted or massaged by me. They were put in as provided.”

“I accepted the fact,” Reynolds added, “that he told the truth.”

Not long after we hung up, Kinew’s spokesman called back.

By then, McLeod Arnould knew I had been speaking with the ghost writer because he wanted to know what Reynolds told me.

My question first.

“No,” McLeod Arnould said. “He did not.” He meant Reynolds didn’t write the book.

McLeod Arnould said he had spoken to Kinew about it.

“This guy,” as he referred to Reynolds, had “an editorial function.”

I asked McLeod Arnould what it was.

“I don’t have specifics, chapter and verse. Exactly all he did… He helped out.”

As in the writing of every book, there were people who “pitched in,” McLeod Arnould added. “And that’s the role this individual played in the writing of Wab’s book.”

So Kinew wrote the book?

“Absolutely,” his spokesman answered. “Yes.”

But did he really?

Friday, Kinew provided a brief written statement that, while providing more detail of his own and humble in tone, avoided answering the two central questions directly.

Did he write the book? And did he have a ghost writer?

Kinew can rightly claim he wrote a version of the book — what he wanted to say — but he didn’t write the book. Not according to the account offered by Reynolds, who, at very least, could have been credited as the co-author.

But we weren’t ever supposed to know that.

There is no shame in struggling while writing a book and needing editing assistance.

I’ve been there.

But there is a problem when a writer takes more credit than he deserves.

Which brings us to the deep and disturbing irony in all of this.

Arguably, Kinew’s most important personal message in the memoir was his getting clean and coming clean. It was about being straight and sincere about who he was and who he has become. Yet he can’t be completely honest about the book that was supposed to be about being honest and how he’s changed.

That’s why there are ghosts that still haunt him.

Ghosts, and now, a ghost writer.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca