Ghost Songs: A Memoir - Softcover

In her elegiac first memoir, Regina McBride delves deep into the psychospiritual explanations for a haunting, less concerned with whether or not specters are real than with why some see them in the first place.--The Village Voice

It's a wonder to me that after reading this book of such intense pain and deep sorrow that I felt--and know I'll continue to feel--peace and hope. Regina McBride has written a beautiful memoir in which ghosts--individual and compound--can, like the living, be transformed from that which we fear to that which we might accept and love.--Michael Thomas, author of MAN GONE DOWN

A rare ghost story that isn't fiction.--Vulture, Best Fall Entertainment

[McBride's] journey toward recovery takes her from New York to the desert of New Mexico and finally to the shores of Ireland, where she is able to reconcile the events that happened to her and to her parents. The magnitude of the author's grief is at times overwhelming; there's an unerring sense of distress and disorder. By the end of the book, we've pieced together her life--I felt an odd, poignant sense of calm with her when, in the final pages, she sits in a café in Dublin.--The Paris Review, Editor's Pick

What makes this book so original is the almost uncanny way McBride's narrative blurs the edges between a tortured past and a confusing present. She dares to hope that a half-formed ghost she sees at the foot of her bed is an amalgam of both of her parents, no longer separate--their unconstrained spirit as fluid and searching as her own.--Oprah.com, Editor's Pick

[A] soul-wrenching memoir. A powerful depiction of a teenager understanding the complexity of newfound adult responsibility, poverty, and her parents' identity, while coming to terms with the trauma of loss and her encounters with the miraculous.--Publishers Weekly

Beautiful, compelling story . . . I loved this book because I felt that I went a journey with McBride. I understood what she lived. I would recommend this book to anyone.--An ELLE Readers' Choice Book

Regina McBride's lyrical, beautiful writing is all the more astounding when paired with its subject matter. . . . Unflinching, yet tender, McBride's memoir is a moving tribute to the realities of one's past and how they shape our present--Read It Forward

Eighteen-year-old Regina McBride is haunted by the ghosts of her parents. Her father visits her—he is desperate, but she doesn’t know how to help him. Her mother is a quiet figure, obscured by light—a flash at the foot of the bed. Regina, raised Irish Catholic and with the ironclad belief that some sins are unforgivable, fears her parents are trapped between worlds, forever punished after they committed suicide within a few months of each other.Terrorized by these visitations and flattened by grief, Regina slowly begins her hazardous journey to recovery. Lyrical and lovely, harrowing and haunting, Ghost Songs charts her struggle to separate madness from imagination and sorrow from devastation. From New York to the desert of New Mexico to the shores of Ireland, Regina searches for herself, her home, and a way to return to the family that remains. Ghost Songs is an exploration of memory, a meditation on love and loss, and, in the end, a celebration of life and the living.