Not long after my dad passed away, I started seeing a male cardinal around our backyard. He’d perch on the fence outside our family room window, as if he were watching us inside. We took to calling him Grandpa. We’d wave whenever we saw him, call out “Hey Grandpa! We’re fine! Love you!” Then we’d laugh at ourselves. But we kept doing it anyway.
After my mom died, Grandpa started showing up with a female partner. Naturally, we called her Grandma. And after my husband’s beloved Uncle Bob died a few months later, the cardinal pair started appearing with a male bluejay beside them. I’ll let you guess what we called him. (Uncle Bob stopped showing up after a couple of days. We took this to mean that he’d moved on to visiting others, once Grandma and Grandpa had shown him the ropes.)
Whether you think of these as coincidences or believe there’s something more at play–and I believe both can be true at once–the idea of a life beyond the one we know is an interesting subject to think about. Eric Nuzum’s “Giving Up the Ghost: A Story About Friendship, 80s Rock, a Lost Scrap of Paper, and What It Means to Be Haunted” is a memoir about a young man who grows up believing he’s haunted by the ghost of a child he’s never met, for reasons he doesn’t understand.
He refers to this ghost only as Little Girl. She shows up in a recurring nightmare wearing a blue dress and screaming gibberish. She clearly wants him to understand something–but what? Is this why she’s pursuing him? She makes strange sounds in the house at night. She opens doors that were closed securely. Sometimes, he just has the sense that she’s right there, even if he can’t see her. But he doesn’t know why, and he doesn’t know what she wants from him.
Nuzum’s memoir is about many other things as well: his complicated friendship with a girl named Laura, his struggle with mental illness, the way that struggle affected his family, 80’s music, his visits to supposedly haunted places (including a Civil War battleground) in an effort to figure whether ghosts are real. That makes the memoir sound very fragmented, I know, but somehow it all holds together.
I connected with this memoir on so many levels. Nuzum grew up in a small town that made little room for strange kids who listened to strange music and questioned the established order of things. The 80’s music he writes about was the soundtrack of my own college years. He reminded me of little-known bands that showed up on college radio stations and nowhere else in those days, making you feel like you were part of a secret club if you could name them. He also struggled with mental illness at a time when it was badly misunderstood. The medications used to treat it caused serious problems of their own.
And then there’s Laura. Nuzum’s account of his relationship with a friend-who-is-a-girl-but-sadly-not-my-girlfriend is painfully familiar. Who hasn’t had their heart broken by that relationship?
If you’re looking for a ghost story, this is not the book you want. Nuzum’s attempts to understand Little Girl end up being a smaller part of the story than the title suggests. But even though his obsession with being haunted was what drew me to this memoir, I became much more interested in other parts of the story. In fact, I found his visits to supposedly haunted places the least compelling part of the book. They felt like odd and unnecessary bits wedged into a much more compelling narrative about learning to navigate the world.
On the other hand, if an honest account of growing up in the 80’s sounds appealing, you’ll enjoy this book. Nuzum has a sharp eye for detail; his descriptions of the dying Ohio town where he grew up fit beautifully with the general sense of mourning that pervades the narrative. There is something deeply sad about a town disappearing–about all the familiar places just ceasing to exist. There is something inherently sad about growing up, too, even though we know it’s inevitable (and, as my dad used to say, preferable to the alternative.) We do regrettable things that cannot be undone. We do them long before we’re old enough to understand their potential consequences. And we lose so many people we love. Some of them we lose to circumstances we can’t control, but some we lose simply because they do not love us quite enough to stick around.
I found “Giving Up the Ghost” hard to put down at times. Even though it wasn’t the book I thought I’d be reading, it’s a book I’m very glad to have read.
* By the way: I learned about this book via the free Book Bub newsletter that I receive via email every day. Book Bub allows you to select the genres you’re interested in, then compiles a daily list of discounted (or free!) e-books in those genres. I’ve already loaded up my Kindle for the foreseeable future, but I still keep downloading more books because Book Bub does such a great job of matching my interests–and I can’t stand to miss out on a bargain. If you don’t already subscribe to their newsletter, it’s definitely worth a try.
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