A Look at What’s Haunting Modern America
A Feature Review of
Ghosted: An American Story
Nancy French
Hardcover: Zondervan, 2024
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Reviewed by Alex Joyner
The thing about ghost-written celebrity memoirs is that they often come across as buffed up versions of the “author.” The celebrity provides the raw material and the usually anonymous co-writer produces a life story with the wrinkles ironed out.
Nancy French knows the field quite well, having made a living ghost writing for prominent conservative political figures. Her skill shows in the polish she gives to her own memoir, Ghosted: An American Story. But you can also tell that she’s stretching to provide more grit than usual because hers is not a traditional American conservative success story; it’s about betrayal and how the evangelical Christian political movement has turned not only on her, but also on its own values.
French is no stranger to ominous turns. The opening chapters of her book place us smack dab in the midst of her extended Appalachian family full of characters that aren’t quite ready for prime time. Uncle Buck is a card-carrying member of the KKK. Uncle Jasper has a potentially murderous history. Other cousins take to defanging rattlesnakes and flinging them into the family moonshine joint to chase out unwelcome patrons.
Sulphur Wells Church of Christ, (named for the old sulfur well that local legend says still bubbles beneath Kentucky Lake), becomes a refuge for young Nancy. It’s a place where comforting songs and a seemingly caring community give her a sense of belonging, despite confusing lectures on sexual purity. The confusion curdles to trauma and shame when Nancy is sexually abused by Conrad, the young preacher who organized the Vacation Bible School. “I sang, side by side with people who were supposed to be family members on our journey toward heaven,” French says. “But the sulfur still bubbled up if you knew where to look.” (38)
French has a propulsive style of writing and her personal story only becomes more dramatic as she navigates adolescence and college with a nightmare boyfriend who threatens her life before she is able to escape. Along the way, however, she meets David French, at the time a Harvard law student, who helps recruit her to Lipscomb, a conservative Christian college where he is an alum. Their eventual marriage creates a partnership that places them in the highest circles of the Republican Party where they advocate for what used to be mainstream conservative causes.
Nancy begins a writing career that not only leads to her ghostwriting for former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin (and spending a fascinating month in her Alaska home), but also to a close relationship with the family of Mitt Romney. Inevitably, however, all conservative loyalties are tested by the Republican nomination of Donald Trump in 2016. Both Nancy and David, who was a staff writer with the National Review at the time, followed their consciences into the never-Trump camp and David flirted briefly with running for president himself.
The vetting process for that potential run uncovered all of Nancy’s anxieties and forced her to confront in new ways her traumatic experiences, which were now threatening to come out on a national stage. It also led to a painful experience of being abandoned—ghosted, as the title of the book has it—by the very community the Frenches had served and which had nurtured them, particularly during David’s service in Iraq.
It’s hard to tell what audience this book will find. Perhaps there is a self-critical corner of evangelical Christians who will cringe along with Nancy at the treatment the movement gave to a couple that left on principle. Perhaps there are folks on the political left who will appreciate the nuance and courage the Frenches display in rejecting a candidate they consider morally deficient without “going over to the other side.”
But there isn’t much room for a thoughtful middle ground in today’s political landscape and the continuing treatment of the Frenches in the mainstream these days is telling. David was recently disinvited from a panel on political polarization at the conservative-leaning Presbyterian Church of America (PCA) General Assembly for being too polarizing himself. He and Nancy also face some of the same skepticism from the left that Nancy experienced when she took some classes at NYU after her undergrad experience: “I was considered liberal at Lipscomb, but a feminist apostate at NYU; I’d switched from one monolithically religious school to another. I’d never be accepted, because people saw me as a project, someone to change” (99).
Ghosted is a brave book with a compelling story by a smart author who brings her vulnerabilities to the page and defies the voices that would rather she just go away. Underlying the book, however, is a discordance between style and intent. French quotes Aleksander Solyzhenitsyn’s necessary lesson on moral purity: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them…But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being” (256). This is a central message she wants to convey in her story—that the ideological cleansing practiced by both parties is actually harmful hubris.
But that message comes packaged in a heavily-processed style that conforms to the expectations of the casual reader. In such stories there has to be a redemptive arc. There has to be a neat narrative where seemingly random facts snap back into place like a jigsaw puzzle piece. (Uncle Jasper never murdered his wife after all!) Every off-kilter beat finds its place in a master narrative orchestrated by a divine presence.
Ghosted, for all its hard truths, has an easy veneer that threatens to undercut its message. You can see it most clearly in French’s earnest retelling of the visit of a self-proclaimed prophet to the small group of Christian couples the Frenches met with regularly. The prophet turns out to be uncannily accurate in his predictions about her upcoming pregnancy and she moves through the next nine months with a calm assurance about how things will work out. It’s providence with an air of inevitability, which sits uncomfortably with those of us who carry around a keen awareness of the contingencies of life.
But I complain too much. If you like narratives in the vein of Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, you’ll like Ghosted and you’ll likely come away with admiration for Nancy French’s integrity and writing chops. And her book is an important glimpse into this troubling moment for the whole Christian Church, caught as it is in the midst of a nation gripped by a political fever. You may even find yourself grappling with the identities you claim, experiencing a moment like French has when she went to her local Tennessee Republican Party gathering to cast a vote in support of her sister, who was running for county party president:
“When I got to the door of the community center, the person at the front desk looked at me sideways. “Nancy French,” she said my name slowly. “Are you even a Republican?”…I didn’t know how to respond. I’d written several books for Republican politicians, written barn-burner speeches, traveled to Fox News to allow my clients to “own the libs,” and briefly lived with Sarah Palin. I was married to a pro-life attorney who served his country in uniform. I supported the troops, was for limited government, and loved God. “No,” I told her, “I don’t suppose I am” (208-9).
Alex Joyner
Alex Joyner is a writer and pastor serving Charlottesville First United Methodist Church in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is the author of several books including A Space for Peace in the Holy Land: Listening to Modern Israel & Palestine (Englewood Review of Books, 2014). He edits the Heartlands website (www.alexjoyner.com).
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