STOCK ISLAND — Hitting bookstores Tuesday is Levi Johnstons 319-page memoir with the provocative title: Deer in the Headlights: My Life in Sarah Palins Crosshairs.
The story about Johnston being forced out of his idyllic hunting and fishing world in tiny Wasilla, Alaska, and thrust into the glaring limelight at the 2008 National Republican Convention is his. But the book was written 5,200 miles away from his home by a couple with six grandchildren who live at the Key West Harbor Yacht Club on a boat named Coconut.
Johnstons ghostwriters are husband-and-wife team James and Lois Cowan, who had written three books together but none since 1998, when Lights & Sirens: A Writers Guide to Emergency Rescue Professions, was published.
Their pitch to Johnston, the-ex boyfriend of Bristol Palin and father of their son Tripp, was simple: The Cowans thought I was getting the shaft, Johnston said in the books acknowledgements.
While watching TV in their luxurious 50-foot vessel, which is part tugboat and part tramp steamer, the Cowans repeatedly saw Palin and others portray Johnston as a scumbag and deadbeat dad.
What we saw was a kid, a nice kid, Lois Cowan said.
On a lark, Lois Cowan found an email address for Johnstons agent, Tank Jones. She sent him a message saying she and her husband would be interested in telling Johnstons side of the story.
Someone needed to rise to his rescue, said Lois Cowan, 70.
James Cowan, 68, thought the email was a waste of time, but 10 minutes later Jones called. Suspicion and another potential author led to months of discussion and a long trip to Anchorage.
The Cowans did not know exactly what to expect from Johnston. But the three hit it off well, laughing over his hunting escapades. They landed the book deal.
The Cowans spent countless hours interviewing Johnston during two month long trips to Alaska. They met with him at the modest home in Wasilla he shares with best friend Dominick Nickels, at their Best Western hotel room in Wasilla that was just 300 yards from the Palins home, and with Johnston in his pickup truck as went about his daily life.
We got beyond the ghostwriter-author work, and had conversations because we enjoyed spending time together, Johnston wrote. They acted like another couple of parents pushing, prodding, expecting me to understand and explain a confusing series of events and a time when I often chose to bury my head under my quilt.
He was about five hours away from Wasilla on a hunting trip when he got the astonishing news his longtime girlfriends mother was on the GOP ticket. Bristol, 17 at the time and carrying his child, told him to get home fast.
Goodbye mullet. Goodbye his simple life as he knew it.
He instantly became a household name. He posed for Playgirl; was interviewed by Vanity Fair, GQ and Larry King.
Book publisher Touchstone/Simon & Schuster plug Johnstons story this way: Best known as Bristol Palins baby daddy and Sarah Palins favorite whipping boy, Levi Johnston sets out to clear his name and with any luck end his run as Alaskas most hated man.
Actually, according to an E-Poll Market Research list released in August, Johnston makes the Top 10 of hated Americans, along with the likes of Casey Anthony, O.J. Simpson and Nadya Suleman, the Octomomo.
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