Millie Bobby Brown’s debut novel is a bestseller. Does it matter that the 19-year-old actor didn’t write it?

Amber Gwynne

Stranger Things actor Millie Bobby Brown’s debut novel, Nineteen Steps, revolves loosely around true events. In 1943, the Bethnal Green tube disaster claimed the lives of 173 Londoners, due to faulty stairs in the station used as an air raid shelter.

This tragedy, the UK’s largest loss of civilian life in the second world war, was one Brown’s own grandmother survived. Brown describes her novel as a “really special project” inspired by her family’s WWII history.

But she didn’t write Nineteen Steps. A ghostwriter named Kathleen McGurl did. McGurl described the process in a blog post:

I was sent a lot of research that had already been pulled together by Millie and her family, and plenty of ideas, and we had a couple of Zoom calls. And then I knuckled down and wrote the first draft, while Millie continued sending more ideas via WhatsApp. The book went through