MiL Ghostwriting Her Autobiography

[u/FransizaurusRex]

My MIL is the archetypal boundary-disregarding not-matriarch a lot of this group comes here to commiserate about. So I thought you all might appreciate this recent development.

She’s recently announced that she is going to publish her autobiography. At first, I was baffled — she doesn’t read books, writing has never been a hobby, and she’s dyslexic, so she avoids reading (and learning) like the plague. I was even more confused because she has no career, no track record of accomplishments, and isn’t exactly a deep thinker.

It turns out she’s planning to pay a ghostwriter to do it for her, based on the advice of “no less than 18 psychics” who have told her she has a book to give the world. One of them even referred her to the ghostwriting company. She’s funding this vanity project with money her husband inherited after the death of his mother — which adds a layer of tragic irony to the whole thing (realizing as I’m writing this).

As for the content, it’s a grab bag of disconnected topics she rattled off: a childhood near-death experience, her motherhood journey, her relationship with food, and something called the Violet Flame. When asked how these fit together, she shrugged and said, “That’s the ghostwriter’s job to figure out.” I looked into the Violet Flame and discovered it’s a New Age self-help concept rooted in theosophy — a mishmash of Eastern philosophy, occultism, and Western mysticism from the late 1800s that spread into fringe cult-like spiritual movements in the 20th century. Think crystal healing, Atlantis energy grids, and alien “truths.” So now I know in the course of MIL’s dabbling, she’s picked up some ideas that are pretty far fringe.

Now we have the task of making sure boundaries are respected in print. My spouse wants nothing to do with the book and to be dragged into a narrative where MIL parades her “glorious motherhood” while the reality is years of emotional damage she’s worked to recover from. And under no circumstances is our daughter to appear in it — no names, no details, no photos. Period.

So yeah. That’s on the to-do list this week.

[u/dachsie-knitter-22]

Reach out to the Ghostwriter when you get their name from MIL. Make clear you will sue them if any names you do not want appear in this book.

MIL will probably LIVE to tell you about her wonderful relationship with ghostwriter.