Gwyneth Paltrow Denies Rumors That Her Cookbook Was Ghostwritten

Gwyneth Paltrow always markets as a woman as the woman who can do it all: she has a successful acting career, runs her own website, has a rock star husband and she’s raising a young family. So it was pretty shocking for me to find out that Gwyneth Paltrow’s cookbook My Father’s Daughter was written by someone else! Can you imagine? The catch is that I faced a feature article about culinary ghostwriters, the New York Times described cook and author Julia Turshen as the writer behind the actress’s best selling book of family recipes. The NY Times used the cover of Ms Paltrow’s book as art for the story titled I Was a Cookbook Ghostwriter and said Ms Turshen was Gwyneth’s ghostwriter, noting in passing that she is ‘writing a second cookbook with Gwyneth Paltrow.’

They claim Gwyneth Paltrow’s cookbook My Father’s Daughter was ghostwritten!

Oops!

But that arcticle was read also by Gwyneth and the actress quickly gave a decisive response! She claims she wrote the book all by herself. She wrote on her Facebook page:

Love @nytimes dining section but this weeks facts need checking. No ghost writer on my cookbook, I wrote every word myself.”

But I guess that Gwyneth misunderstood the term ‘ghostwriter.’ In a profile on the Epicurious food website, Ms Turshen says she ‘assisted’ on My Father’s Daughter. And recently Julia has written in Food & Wine magazine:

Gwyneth and I got to talking about putting a cookbook together and spent the next year or so gathering her recipes, and the stories behind them. The result is the new My Father’s Daughter. Full of family-oriented, ultra-reliable food, it is a personal cookbook that is authentic to Gwyneth and the way she feeds people. It is also an homage to her late father, the TV and film producer Bruce Paltrow, whom she refers to as ‘a supreme gourmand.”

In the the New York Times article, Ms Turshen is quoted on what it takes to be a good ghostwriter. She says:

It actually helps to be an idiot. A hungry one.”

Huh… What can I say? I guess none of them lost by working on that book together. Paltrow helped Julia to become a producer on the TV series with TV chef Mario Batali about Spanish food and and Julia on her turn helped Gwyneth out on her Goop blog.

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