Time‘s resident humorist, Joel Stein, responds to the soon-to-be-released Sarah Palin autobiography with a tome of his own–Rogue Journalist: An Even More American Life–complete with, as per Palin’s book, a ghostwriter. “When I heard that Sarah Palin wrote her upcoming 400-page autobiography, Going Rogue: An American Life, in four months,” Stein writes,
I thought, What took her so long? To prove that introspection doesn’t need to be time-consuming, I decided to try to write my memoir in one day. Since Palin had a ghostwriter, I figured it was only fair that I have help too, so I called Neil Strauss, who co-wrote the best-selling memoirs of Marilyn Manson, Mötley Crüe, Dave Navarro and Jenna Jameson. Strauss and fellow ghostwriter Anthony Bozza run an imprint called Igniter, which — after training people to write other people’s autobiographies — is cranking out the stories of model Amber Smith, gangster Johnny Fratto and Bozo the Clown. This was clearly my guy.
You can read the results of Klein’s autobiographical inquiry here; in the meantime, the book’s “cover” itself is priceless:
I think I smell the next Nobel Prize for Literature…
Megan Garber is an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. She was formerly a CJR staff writer.