Amerie Isn’t Just ‘1 Thing’: Inside Her Life as an Author, Singer and Mom

Twenty years on, Amerie is still best known for her hit single “1 Thing” — but she never stopped making music, and now she’s adding a new achievement to her résumé: literary fiction author.

The singer, 45, will publish her first novel for adults, This Is Not a Ghost Story, on Tuesday, June 10. This might come as a surprise to fans who know her only for her R&B bops, but Amerie is an avid reader and a longtime publishing industry booster. Years before BookTok could make or break an author’s career, she ran her own YouTube book vlog, and she founded a book club in 2019. She also edited the best-selling young adult anthology Because You Love to Hate Me, which was published in 2017 and featured one of her short stories.

“I was always going to write adult fiction,” Amerie exclusively told Us Weekly ahead of the book’s release, adding that she’s been working on the novel off and on for about 11 years. “I had written this, but it needed to be tucked away in a drawer. It wasn’t really totally complete yet. And sometimes I find that it’s harder to revise something that you’ve written and you’re kind of married to, rather than just completely start from scratch. … This one, it was just so close to my heart.”

The novel tells the story of John, a dead Black man whose peaceful afterlife is thrown into chaos when he suddenly crosses back over into modern-day Los Angeles and becomes an instant celebrity as the world’s first real ghost. As he searches for a way back to the hereafter, he attracts a series of hangers-on — some helpful, others less so — who sometimes have their own ulterior motives for hanging out with a spirit.

“It was really trying to take something fantastical and drop it squarely into our very real world and really try as a thought experiment to think what would really happen,” Amerie told Us of the book’s unique premise. “That was it. And then everything else — theme and the explorations of found family and celebrity culture but also the ability to see oneself from within and from without at the same time — those are all things that came, but I knew none of that when I was going in. It was just that one theme.”

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The result is a totally compelling read that blends elements of fantasy and a pointed critique of contemporary celebrity worship, with a dash of political commentary thrown in for good measure. It helped that Amerie, having released her first album in 2002, had plenty of real-life experience in the entertainment industry to draw on when she created characters like Hannah, the no-nonsense publicist aiming to make John a star, or Persephone, the aspiring actress who has mixed feelings about dating John to advance her own career.

“I felt like that’s really what would happen if he came to Los Angeles,” she explained. “It wouldn’t take him long before he was spotted by someone who can do something with this, who can make something of this. … It was just fun for me. I was able to draw a lot on my experience, working with my own publicists, just working to see how the entertainment business in general works.”

While Amerie is thrilled for the book to finally be in readers’ hands, it’s not the only project she’s been cooking lately. She’s also been working on a new album, which she expects will come out later this summer or in early fall. The first single, “Mine,” dropped in March.

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“I’m just feeling really creative and I wanna make sure that I’m able to get it all out,” she said. “That record called ‘Mine,’ it’s right in line with the project, which is shaping up to be something very romantic. That’s a big deal to me. I really wanted romance. I was like, ‘Give me all the romance, the sensuality, but the optimism.’ I want the optimism of love. Even if things are not going well, let me feel like it can be made right.”

She’s also busy parenting her 7-year-old son, River, whom she shares with husband Lenny Nicholson — and found the time to make a surprise appearance at Coachella in April with Muni Long, where she performed “1 Thing” for thousands of thrilled fans.

Even as she’s branching out and breaking new ground, Amerie still has love for the track that made her a household name two decades ago.

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“I never get tired of performing it, which is pretty important,” she told Us. “It’s exciting. It always feels fresh to me.”

And it always feels good to be reminded that her fans are still rocking with her.

“As an artist, that makes you feel really good, to know that you can still connect with people and they’re still connecting to the things that you’ve done in the past,” she explained. “[I’m] just really appreciative of that. I think people assume that artists don’t feel any way about that. People may feel that we are just used to it or we don’t have any emotions attached to it, but they don’t realize that a lot of times artists just kind of don’t know if people care about certain things. And so they don’t know that it really is a surprise. Or even if it’s not a total surprise, it still hits you in a fresh way every time when you feel like someone appreciates what you do and that connection that you’ve made with that person.”

This Is Not a Ghost Story is out Tuesday, June 10.