“While I was singing in a hairbrush, I was also writing stories and stapling them together,” Amerie tells ESSENCE ahead of the release of her first novel for adults, This Is Not a Ghost Story. Perhaps best known for her Billboard Hot 100 top 10 hit single “1 Thing,” which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, Amerie has carved out a space for herself in the literary world—first in children’s and young adult fantasy, then with her eponymous book club, and now with her new creative endeavor.
The Massachusetts-born singer was always a voracious reader, checking out the maximum number of books from the library on all manner of topics from Nostradamus and extrasensory perception to the occult, mixed in with novels like The Chronicles of Narnia, Dragonlance and Amelia Bedilia.
“My parents were always very free, and the librarians would let you check out anything,” she says. That early access to ideas is why she’s a staunch advocate for freedom of speech—especially now, as it faces growing threats under the current political administration. However, as a mom she does believe that parents should know what their kids are reading and understands their concerns. “I have my own views on what I think everyone should know, I also understand it gets tricky when you try to tell a parent what they should be doing with their child.”
Amerie’s love of narrative carried over into her own writing, petitioning her teacher to let her write a fictional doomed romance for her history paper on the Civil War. “I got an A though!” she laughs.
It’s a no-brainer, then, that Amerie would pursue a new industry, editing the YA fantasy collection Because You Love to Hate Me: 13 Tales of Villainy, in 2017, as well as contributing her own stories to several compilations, and her picture book, You Will Do Great Things, published in 2023.
Amerie’s Book Club started informally in 2014 as a lifestyle YouTube channel, but graduated to the Instagram format we now know it as in 2019, prior to the influx of celebrity book clubs over the past few years. Where she differentiates her selections is in the diversity of voices, including everyone from Raven Leilani to Tony Tulathimutte to Jonathan Franzen; topics such as ethnic cleansing in Palestine, the 1921 Tulsa race massacre and the male loneliness crisis; and a variety of formats from non-fiction to poetry to short story collections.
“I’m into diverse voices and interesting perspectives that you might not hear from all the time,” Amerie says. “Diversity of identity is important, but I think the most important thing is diversity of thought. Although the former can influence the latter, it’s really important to hear from people who think differently.”
She then interviews the authors about their books at the end of the month.
“It’s less of an interview, which sounds so formal, but more chatty,” Amerie says. “It makes the author feel like it was off the cuff, they could talk about what they wanted to, we don’t have to stick to talking points for the book. It’s a conversation.”
Amerie is taking a break from that structure this year (though there’s still a wealth of books highlighted weekly) as she embarks on the publicity tour for her own book, This Is Not a Ghost Story. “It’s in line for those who have followed the book club and love my selections. I feel like it’s the best fit for that reader,” she says.
The novel follows John, who after his amnesic death is thrust into the life of an influencer in Hollywood as the first identifiable ghost. “It’s about a ghost, but it isn’t a ghost story in the way one might think,” Amerie explains. “It’s not a horror story. It’s not about the mystical elements of being a ghost. It’s not even about being ‘ghostly’ in the way that we would normally think of a ghost, because in every other way John is like every other person, it just so happens that he’s a ghost.”
Amerie grapples with themes of grief and trauma through John’s journey to find out what happened to him and why he keeps seeing the Grey House and the Grey Man. She’s hesitant to spoil what the motif of the haunted house means, except to say that “the prisons we’re in are the prisons we put ourselves in. Sometimes we isolate ourselves to keep ourselves safe, but it keeps you separate from other things. We can sometimes put ourselves in our own bubbles.”
The singer first started working on This Is Not a Ghost Story a decade ago, and it’s clear she was inspired by her own experiences in the music industry and the notoriety that comes with that. “I’ve been around that so much that understanding those dynamics is second nature,” she says. “It was exciting to do something with it.”
Did she have to change any of the themes of influencer culture, which feel so resonant for now? “Not really, because at that time Instagram was [in its infancy],” she says. “The element of celebrity and Hollywood has always been the same. It’s about the human inclination to worship something, if it’s not royalty [or religion], then it’s going to be celebrity. Those things are embedded within us no matter what time period we’re in.”
“John has a certain weight put onto him because so many people project ideas onto him,” she continues. “We’re so used to living that too; anyone with an Instagram account can understand. You are yourself, and then you are the side of yourself that they see when you post pictures.” The same can certainly be said of celebrities and influencers.
This Is Not a Ghost Story is one of many manuscripts that Amerie has written since she returned to her childhood passion for storytelling around 2012. “I do fully intend for those to be out in the world,” she says, clearly enjoying the process of rewriting a recent story she had intended to be YA, but over the course of her edits, had an epiphany that it’s another adult novel. “There’s this heart-wrenching moment between one of the main characters and his mom, and then I realized—the story is about his mother! Oh, I wrote a whole story but I realized it was something different.”
Amerie’s eyes light up when the conversation veers into topics of dark matter, quantum physics and their intersections with spirituality. Sounds like the types of books she would check out from the library as a child, and the perfect follow up to This Is Not a Ghost Story.