One morning in May, a car ferried me across leafy suburban Kent to an executive gated community, through three sets of security barriers, past driveways occupied by Bentleys, to the door of a neo-Queen Anne mansion. “Bloody hell,” the driver choked. “Who lives here?” “No one,” I mumbled idiotically, trying not to look equally wide-eyed as I wondered what I had signed myself up for.
Five months later to the day, I opened the newspapers to see that what I had signed up for was on the bestseller list. It has been, from day one to the end, a fabulously surreal experience.
It all began late in April with an email. Rio Ferdinand had just signed a book deal, and wanted me to write it. What did I think?
My first thought was: Is this a wind-up? I am not a ghost writer. I’m not even a biographer. I was barely even sure I knew exactly how ghostwriting worked.
Rio’s story, however, was intensely recognisable to me. The footballer had lost his wife, Rebecca, to breast cancer, leaving him to raise their three young children alone. My own mother had died of breast cancer when I was a similar age to his kids, so I knew what it was to be a motherless child. I had also been widowed young very suddenly, and like Rio left the lone parent of bereaved and traumatised children. I knew, too, a bit about what Rebecca had been through, having undergone treatment for breast cancer myself two years ago. Journalists are professional non-experts, and spend most of our careers covering subjects we know almost nothing about. The chance to write a story this close to my heart was one I wasn’t about to turn down.
There was just one snag: the entire project had to be completed within 10 weeks.
Actually, that wasn’t the only problem I could see. In his BBC documentary, Being Mum and Dad, Rio had been very honest about how uncomfortable it was for him to talk about his emotions, and it was clear from the scenes featuring his father that conversations about feelings figured little in the Ferdinand family culture. I was going to have to ask both Rio and his relatives to talk about the most painful details of his private life, and arrived at his door on day one unsure how on earth this was going to work. Feeling apprehensive enough as it was, it’s probably a good job I was blissfully unaware of how many ghostwriting projects fail because the ghost and subject fall out.
Rio and I spent most of the next month on his sofa, painstakingly reliving the hardest chapter of his life. Sessions could last hours, sometimes late into the night, occasionally interrupted by one of his children wandering in looking for an iPad. If it was sunny we’d sit in the garden so that he could sunbathe while we talked, him prone on a lounger with his face tilted towards the sun while I made notes, evoking the comical configuration of a patient on the psychoanalyst’s couch.
The funny thing was that a lot of the time it really did feel like therapy. Any doubts about how far Rio would be willing to open up proved entirely unfounded; not once did he shy away from an intrusive line of inquiry, but committed himself to the challenge of full disclosure with unshakable nerve. His account of his domestic shortcomings as a husband was jaw-dropping: until Rebecca died he didn’t even know how to operate the dishwasher – and he was painfully frank about always putting football first. Even when Rebecca lay dying, he wouldn’t let her acknowledge out loud the truth of what was happening. “Stop chatting shit,” he would tell her, unable to bear the fact that this was a battle neither she nor he could win. But he is also a lot funnier than I’d realised, and although at times there were tears, at others we were both doubled over in fits of laughter.
Men’s difficulty with talking about feelings became a big theme of the book, and the extent to which Rio and his family had simply never had these sort of conversations before never ceased to stagger me. Their willingness to do so now, however, made me begin to wonder whether a family culture of – as Rio would put it – “Not chatting your business”, might often really be a culture of no one asking any questions. Far from taking offence, even the most private of his family members seemed to find being intimately quizzed surprisingly cathartic. Instead of struggling to elicit material, I quickly found my Dictaphone filling up with confidences far too personal to commit to print.
I became wildly paranoid about the audio files and transcripts, and had nightmares about a tabloid hacking my hard drive. When the thought occurred that the contents of my laptop could be sold to the Daily Mail for a price higher than my ghostwriting fee, I began to see why so many celebrities exist in a permanent state of suspicion. If every detail of your life is a valuable commodity, everyone you meet becomes someone who might sell what they can get. I don’t think I’d ever fully appreciated what this must do to one’s relationship to the world, and came to marvel at Rio’s capacity to remain normal.
The one thing about Rio that isn’t normal, however, is his memory. It is shocking! I’ve seldom known anyone so jaw-droppingly hazy about past life-defining moments, but while this made it tricky at times to get narrative details straight, it also dramatised another big theme of the book, and gave an insight into the price many men must pay for professional success. From an early age, an elite footballer must train his mind to focus on winning, to the exclusion of all else. Rio could recall the minutiae of a mid-table away match for Man Utd in 2009, but when asked about a key detail of family history would frequently scratch his head and admit: “You’ll have to ask my mum.” Football had simply left very little space in his head for anything else. A mentality that had won him so many medals was no help to him when he found himself in sole charge of the family, and I suspect many successful men hit by personal tragedy have discovered something similar.
The deeper we probed, the more fascinatingly rich and complex Rio’s story became. I would have happily carried on interviewing him for months, but with the clock ticking there were just five weeks left in which to write 70,000 words.
The first few pages were strange to write, adopting someone else’s voice is rather like putting on their clothes; they don’t quite fit, and you feel self-conscious. Rio would often describe something as “raw”, but the word felt all wrong on my lips and others didn’t immediately sound quite right on his. For example, would Rio use the word “unmitigated”? I found the best way to answer that question was to picture him in a TV studio doing football punditry. If I couldn’t see him using a word in the studio, it didn’t go in the book.
To my astonishment, I wrote 60,000 words in a fortnight. It was an extraordinary sensation to watch chapter after chapter pour out. It felt as if someone else was writing them – and in a sense, they were. Channelling Rio’s thoughts and voice turned out to be infinitely easier than expressing my own, and I wrote from 3am to 10pm every day without stopping. Liberated from the obligation to be myself, the process felt less like writing than method acting.
The only nerve-racking moment was sending the first chapters to Rio. As a newspaper interviewer there is always an inevitable conflict of interest, for while I have a duty to report every encounter fairly and accurately, my ultimate duty is to the reader, and my role, therefore, to draw the interviewee out beyond anything they would say in a press release. Some interviewers take gladiatorial relish in filing copy they know will make the interviewee blanch when published, but for me this tension is the least favourite part of my job, and the collaborative nature of ghosting seemed enormously appealing. Or it had, anyway, until the point when I actually had to press “send”. What if he hated it? What if he wanted all the most interesting bits taken out? Then what? Never have I been so relieved to get a massive thumbs up.
When the book came out three weeks ago, I found myself wondering if a better term for the role I have played would not be ghost but surrogate writer. Having gestated the book, it is no longer my project but belongs to Rio, its rightful owner. It is his story. When I see Thinking Out Loud in bookshop windows, I am overwhelmed by a surge of affection, and wish nothing but the best for it in the world.
• Thinking Out Loud: Love, Grief and Being Mum and Dad by Rio Ferdinand is published by Hodder & Stoughton, priced £20. It is available from the Guardian Bookshop for £17, including free UK p&p.
