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When We Were Ghouls

A Memoir of Ghost Stories

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
When Amy E. Wallen's southern, blue-collar, peripatetic family was transferred from Ely, Nevada, to Lagos, Nigeria, she had just turned seven. From Nevada to Nigeria and on to Peru, Bolivia, and Oklahoma, the family wandered the world, living in a state of constant upheaval. When We Were Ghouls follows Wallen's recollections of her family who, like ghosts, came and went and slipped through her fingers, rendering her memories unclear. Were they a family of grave robbers, as her memory of the pillaging of a pre-Incan grave site indicates? Are they, as the author's mother posits, "hideous people?" Or is Wallen's memory out of focus?
In this quick-paced and riveting narrative, Wallen exorcizes these haunted memories to clarify the nature of her family and, by extension, her own character. Plumbing the slipperiness of memory and confronting what it means to be a "good" human, When We Were Ghouls links the fear of loss and mortality to childhood ideas of permanence. It is a story about family, surely, but it is also a representation of how a combination of innocence and denial can cause us to neglect our most precious earthly treasures: not just our children but the artifacts of humanity and humanity itself.
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    • Kirkus

      February 1, 2018
      A peripatetic childhood is marked by resentment and loneliness.Because her father worked for a petroleum company, Wallen (Moon Pies and Movie Stars, 2006) moved with her family from Nevada to Nigeria, Peru, and Bolivia, each time suffering "giant, seismic shifts in cultures" that led to a fear of emotional attachments and inevitable loss. In her first nonfiction book, the author creates a candid but uneven rendering of her childhood experiences, probing family stories in an effort to discover reality. One experience, which mystifies Wallen, occurred in Peru, where she remembers that her family looted an ancient gravesite for artifacts, with which they decorated their home. Asking her parents, now in their 80s, for verification, her mother admits that they had been grave robbers but insists that she "had no idea" that what they were doing was illegal, if not immoral. "We were ghouls," Wallen's mother realizes now. "Hideous people." But apart from that event, the family hardly seems ghoulish or hideous, although they were sometimes clueless about young Amy's needs. Unfortunately, family members and friends come across as one-dimensional figures or, worse, stereotypes--e.g., the buxom, warmhearted African nanny, the diffident house steward. Wallen's two older siblings, sent to boarding school in Switzerland, and her father, usually out in the field, are lightly sketched. Her mother, "nervous and harried," emerges as brittle, impatient, and highly demanding. Wallen's longing for her love is a recurring theme. "I had a talent for disappointing her," she writes. The author sees unearthing a dead body as analogous to the perilous project of digging up shards of the past. "Every time you remember," she writes, "you rewrite" and reimagine. "The more often you tell the memory, the more it becomes about you, and the less it becomes about what actually happened." But her self-portrait undermines her project of discovering family history: as she tries to capture her childish perspective, she too often comes across as whiny rather than emotionally vulnerable.Ghosts, skulls, and skeletons haunt a woman's elusive memories.

      COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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  • English

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