When Eleanor Roosevelt delivered her White House memoirs, her editor replied, ‘You have written this too hastily as though you were composing it on a bicycle while pedalling your way to a fire.’ Roosevelt declined the offer of a ghostwriter and took her book to another publisher where, with the help of an army of researchers, she produced a bestseller.

Contemporary political memoirs are rarely produced without editorial support—the unacknowledged ghostwriter, the credited co-author, advisers, researchers, fact checkers and a legion of loyal staff. The ‘author’ is what semioticians might call an ‘unstable’ category, an unusually capacious term that permits a looser definition than other genres. The political memoir might be the result of contemporaneous and copious notes or journal entries (Mark Latham’s Diaries or Gareth Evans’ Cabinet Diary), a collaboration between a politician and a colleague (Greg Combet’s The Fights of My Life, co-authored with his adviser Mark Davis), the result of a lengthy process of forensic interviewing (Steve Bracks with Ellen Whinnett), a dialogue between political allies (Peter Costello and Peter Coleman), or an extended conversation that produces a hybrid of memoir and biography (Malcolm Fraser and Margaret Simons).