Ghost Songs

The elements of novelist McBride's (The Nature of Water and Air) story are not unusual for a memoir: tragedy, a sense of alienation from remaining family, a self-imposed hospital stay, escape to a new place fraught with meaning, even ghostly hallucinations. But the rapid back-and-forth descriptions of the author's experience, from the teenager clawing her way forward after the tragic deaths of her parents and childhood recollections of her deeply troubled family, pull readers into the suffocating realm of her anguish. McBride resists a cohesive, comforting narrative, instead relating snippets of memory. She does not speculate expansively on her parents' inner lives, nor interpret the actions of others. Her remembrances stand alone, giving the book an epistolary quality. As McBride wades through her grief, flashbacks of events and images from her youth must now be viewed through the lens of her parents' suicides. The short sections and regular visits to the past may leave some craving a more cohesive time line, but most memoir connoisseurs will want to read this.