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Nancy French's "Ghosted: An American Story"

Dear Friends,

Welcome to Off The Shelf! It is a bit awkward that the book I’d like to share with you today hasn’t even made its way onto my shelf yet.

It arrived last Thursday. I opened it and proceeded to read the entire book by day’s end. I found it very difficult to put down. Senator Mitt Romney apparently had the same experience; in his endorsement, he says that when he opened the book he didn’t stop reading until the final sentence. Unlike the Senator, I had a few things to do that interrupted my reading (whereas the Senate doesn’t do anything of note these days), but I came back to it as soon and as often as I could. Still got it done in a calendar day. What is this page-turner?

Ghosted: An American Story by Nancy French.

In addition to being a supremely well-written memoir, I think it is also a very important memoir. It holds a mirror up to our society, particularly to those on the political right, and prompts what for some ought to be—but won’t—an uncomfortable question: what have we become?

I should back up. Nancy French is David French’s wife. Ghosted is her life story, how a hillbilly college dropout from “the mountain” in Tennessee ended up a successful ghostwriter married to a political conservative who very nearly ran for President of the United States, only to be “ghosted” and alienated from everyone to whom she thought she belonged. It is part J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (only better), part sociopolitical commentary, but mostly it is a story about the grace and miraculous power of God.

Most of that last bit, I suspect, will be lost or fall on deaf ears for many people simply because of Nancy’s husband. But I will not write another essay about David French. I will not write another essay about David French. I will not write another essay about David French…