Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir, the first book from reporter and writer Kat Chow, is undeniably one of the best books you will read this year. Not one of the best nonfiction new releases, not one of the best memoirs; but one of the best books, period. And here’s why …
Loss is a hard thing to read about, an even more difficult thing to write about, and crippling to endure. Chow, however, has an extraordinary ability to put her own personal experiences with grief into words. In Seeing Ghosts, she reflects on the loss of her mother to cancer, while also more broadly examining multigenerational grief throughout her lineage. Digging back into her family history, Chow shares everything from the death of her brother hours after he was born to her mother’s loss of her own mother at age 4. She examines the experiences of family members immigrating to Cuba and the U.S. from China, then relays her own travels to these countries alongside her father as he pursued closure for his own past.
First and foremost, the lens through which Chow sees and shares her mother with the reader is powerfully raw, emotional and real in a way few books are. Her writing will gut you from the very first page, the crisp clarity of her memories providing such detail you will feel as if you were there also. For instance: the unforgettable conversation where her mother once asked to be stuffed, taxidermised if you will, upon her death so she could watch over her daughter even after she was gone. Chow has mastered the ability to voice the painful fallout of loss in all its excruciating detail, capturing the essence of how grief feels with each event along the way, no matter how small. Take for example the well-meaning platitudes offered by others in the early days of loss which only prickled and drew pain, or the moment she realised the sound of her mother’s voice was beginning to slip away in her mind.
Without a doubt Chow conveys how much a mother, both in life and death, shapes a daughter; how inexplicably large her mother’s love looms over the lives she left behind. But she also touches on so much more in these pages. She honestly ruminates on her relationship with her father and her sisters, reflects back upon her parents’ difficult-to-understand marriage. She shares the influence of her familial and cultural beliefs on the family as a whole and on each of them individually. She relays experiences of racism and discrimination, and also criticises how the broken healthcare system in America erects barriers to even those who have health insurance as they are seeking care. And she bravely reveals the “what ifs” which have plagued her for years, the thoughts of how her mother might have been saved if only something else had happened here or someone had done something differently there.
There is something so approachable, so entirely relatable and heartrending, about the stories shared in Seeing Ghosts. The natural flow of the book, as Chow shares piece by piece without following a chronological order, mirrors how memories come and go at random in one’s mind, making it easy to lose yourself within the pages. She also effortlessly captures the many ways grief manifests, the ways we approach and avoid it, the ways it changes and shapes us all. There’s even a bit of hope in the notions that those we’ve lost remain all around us — they continue to express themselves in the traits we’ve inherited through genetics and learned behaviour, in the objects around us, and in our memories, long after their physical bodies are gone.
Chow shares her fear of writing specifically about her mother’s death, her struggle with “exorcising” versus memorialising her mother. But there’s something to say for writing about loss to work through your feelings. Something about how laying one’s grief down on paper gives shape and gravity to the barrage of formless emotions which float around inside the mind. And ultimately, Seeing Ghosts seems to do exactly what Chow’s mother wished for when she requested to be stuffed after her death: it preserves her in a physical form, as well as in the mind and heart, for all the years to come.
I’ve done my best to put the experience of reading this book into words, but all the words in the world will simply fall short. Seeing Ghosts is truly a reading experience you need to feel for yourself.
Seeing Ghosts is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of August 24th 2021. Many thanks to Grand Central Publishing for providing me with an advance copy to review. All thoughts and opinions expressed here are entirely my own.
Will you be picking up Seeing Ghosts? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis | Goodreads
For readers of Helen Macdonald and Elizabeth Alexander, an intimate and haunting portrait of grief and the search for meaning from a singular new talent as told through the prism of three generations of her Chinese American family.
Born two years after her parents’ only son died just hours after his birth, Kat Chow became unusually fixated with death. She worried constantly about her parents dying — especially her mother. One morning, when Kat was nine, her mother, a vivacious and mischievous woman, casually made a morbid joke: When she eventually dies, she said laughing, she’d like to be stuffed and displayed in Kat’s future apartment in order to always watch over her.
Four years later when her mother dies unexpectedly from cancer, Kat, her two older sisters, and their father are plunged into a debilitating, lonely grief. With a distinct voice that is wry and heartfelt, Kat weaves together what is part ghost story and part excavation of her family’s history of loss spanning three generations and their immigration from China and Hong Kong to America and Cuba. This redemptive coming-of-age story uncovers the uncanny parallels in Kat’s lineage, including the strength of sisterhood and the complicated duty of looking after parents, even after death.
Seeing Ghosts asks what it means to claim and tell your family’s story: Is writing an exorcism or is it its own form of preservation? What do we owe to our families in our grief, and how does it shape us? In order to answer these questions and to understand her family’s ghosts, Kat unearths their sorrow and challenges the power structures of race, class, and gender. The result is an extraordinary new contribution to the literature of grief and the American family, and a provocative and transformative meditation on who we become under the specter of loss.
