Michael Malice, the celebrity ghost writer, recently raised more than $30,000 on Kickstarter to write an autobiography of Kim Jong-il.
Mr. Malice never met Mr. Kim, who died in 2011, but he has traveled to North Korea, where he got a bunch of books about the dictator for research purposes. The title of the book, which Mr. Malice will write from Mr. Kim’s perspective, will be Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il.
In February, Mr. Malice told me in an email that the first line of the book will be: “I remember the day when I was born perfectly.”
I reached out to Mr. Malice via email this afternoon with a couple of follow-ups. He told me that he plans to to finish the book by October, though he hasn’t started writing it yet.
Won’t it be weird thinking from Mr. Kim’s perspective?
“not weird thinking from his perspective at all since it’s very simplistic,” Mr. Malice bluntly replied, lower case his.
The late cartoonist Harvey Pekar published a book in 2006 called Ego & Hubris: The Michael Malice Story. Based on the title of that book, I asked Mr. Malice if he at all relates to Mr. Kim’s hubristic nature.
“well, I have to relate to anyone I write for. that’s the nature of the work,” Mr. Malice wrote. “But I think his nature is quite different from mine, I mean the man has hundreds of thousands of people in concentration camps. and he also knowingly spreads lies to his entire country.”
