How a Memoir Ghostwriter Thinks About the Greatest Memoir Opening Scene Ever Written

Name: Latham Shinder
Telephone: (903) 271-7770

Latham Shinder
May 19
3 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

The prize goes to Open, the story of tennis star Andre Agassi, ghostwritten by J.R. Moehringer, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and memoirist, no less. Those first few pages are exceptional because the narrator drops us into a specific moment in time—the morning of the big match, an early round at the US Open, Flushing Meadows, New York.

The hero of our story, a thirty-six-year-old tennis pro, is lying on the carpeted floor inside his fancy hotel room. He’s next to the bed, body aching, dreading the day ahead of him. If he wins, he’ll play another match. If he loses, he’ll quit the game forever.

Why This Memoir Opening Scene Works for Readers

What makes the scene remarkable is its specificity, a minute or two in history played out in real time. The scene is concrete and tangible. That, and it’s simplicity. The sentences are spare. Concise. Short. Many are only five or six words. A handful are less. All of which makes falling into the scene easy because there’s nothing in the way. We, the reader, are inside Agassi’s head—a man pining for identity, love, and most of all purpose, after tennis. We are lying there, an aching back, rolling around until we get up the oomph to turn onto our stomach, then the knees, and all the rest of it. We hear the wife, Steffi, and the two unruly children in the other room eating breakfast.

It’s hard to know who gets the credit for the scene—whose idea it was to start the story with Agassi face down in the lush carpet, the unadorned prose, the interior monologue, the existential dread, the emotional complexity. Was it the tennis player who turned pro at sixteen, or his memoir ghostwriter, the writer with a handful of books under his belt and maybe a zillion articles written for New York Times and later the Los Angeles Times. Moehringer doesn’t call himself a memoir ghostwriter, though he is. He calls himself a book collaborator or coauthor, terms with just a hint of pretense.

Why Hiring the Right Memoir Ghostwriter Matters

Moehringer is a great writer, but maybe a better memoir ghostwriter, if clientele and book sales are any indication. After Agassi, he teamed up with Phil Knight for Shoe Dog, and later Prince Harry for Spare, and just this year Ari Emanuel for Roll the Calls. Collectively, Moehringer has racked up book sales in the millions.

My point, I suppose, is that, as a ghostwriter, he did his job—to craft a story of universal human experience wrapped inside a culture-specific expression. In Open, Agassi starts at the end of his career and then digs backward to figure out how he got there and what it all meant. A great memoir creates settings and characters and conflicts so true to humankind that we genuinely care about the outcome.

Of course, Andre Agassi had an interesting life, but it was his ghostwriter who turned that life into a story worth reading, who selected the scenes and the scene sequences, who settled on a voice and tone and pace good enough to carry us through the next 400 pages.

As for Agassi and Knight and the Duke of Sussex and Emanuel, the smartest thing these men did was hire the right memoir ghostwriter. Without a professional writer lurking in the background, none would have dreamed up a compelling opening scene. And none, I’m fairly certain, would have written a book that touched audiences. If you want to know what that working relationship actually feels like, I write about it here.