Snooki's better half: the ghostwriter behind "A Shore Thing"

Writer Valerie Frankel (Photo via Facebook)
She's Jersey-born, opinionated and not afraid to piss people off. But unlike Snooki, Valerie Frankel has read more than two books. She's also written almost a dozen, which is why she was hired to turn patented Jersey Shore-isms into a work of fiction. "A Shore Thing," released this week, follows a girl named Gia who spends the summer picking up Jucie-heads on the beaches of Jersey. Together, Frankel and Snickers have born lines like: "Yum. Johnny Hulk tasted like fresh gorilla" and "She could pour a shot of tequila down his belly and slurp it out of his navel without getting splashed in the face."

For Frankel, a middle-aged woman with two kids and a side career writing about parenting and Sarah Palin, absorbing the essence of the poof seems a stretch. But according to an interview with Slate, Frankel was enthralled by her collaborator: "In our talks she just amazed me again and again with how enthusiastic she was for the project and the face-valueness of her," she says. "My experience with her is that she is an intelligent, enthusiastic, appreciative young woman. She is just a nice kid. It's incredible what she can take."

Frankel was offered the ghostwriting gig after the first season of "Jersey Shore" when Snooki was still a minor player in reality TV. In between churning out chick lit under her own name (her book The Accidental Virgin was optioned as a vehicle for Heather Graham), and a memoir about her addiction to dieting, she had ghostwritten a book with Joan Rivers. That gig landed her the book she now calls "The Friggin' Novel."

On her blog (which is awesome, honest and funny), Frankel writes of her whirlwind summer job: getting inside Snooki's brain. "I had a very tight deadline and managed to produce 1600 words per day, every day, until done, followed by a few weeks of ten-hour-days editing. I'd never tried to write a novel that way before-and I liked it."

She also liked the end product: "Personally, I think it's the funniest, sweetest and liveliest chick lit novel to be released in the last ten years. But maybe I'm prejudiced. You'll have to read it and judge for yourself."

Those who have aren't sure it's so sweet. Jezebel excerpted a disturbing rape scene planted in the book designed to add what Frankel describes as "depth." And the site isn't the only one to question whether depth has a place in a Snooki tome.

Frankel, who spent most of the collaboration getting to know her subject over the phone, disagrees with critics. In fact, she found a spiritual relevance in the Snooki phenomenon. She tells Slate's Jessica Grose: "I always say: Snooki drinks for our sins. I am collaborating with Snooki for those girls, who look at her and they say, she's not this ideal Paris Hilton or Lauren Conrad, this blonde type-she's just from Poughkeepsie.

"She's having a good time and enjoying this lightning-in-a-bottle life that she's in right now...This is why she's a star." The fact that Frankel could spot that trait in Snooki is why she's a ghostwriter.

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