The Ghost in the House by Sara O'Leary

The Ghost in the House by Sara O'Leary is a quiet little book about a woman, Faye, who wakes up on top of her piano dressed only in her husband's dress shirt and a string of black pearls. Turns out that she died five years ago and her husband has remarried, but she still haunts the house where they once lived together happily.

It's hard to describe this book. It's a meditation on grief, a hypothesis about the afterlife, and an evaluation of a marriage. But it's also a ghost story without being a horror story. I find myself writing this a week after finishing it and thinking about it every day, replaying certain scenes, feeling the weighty sadness of an old grief, and wondering what will happen to these characters after the ending. I don't think it will be a book for everyone, but it hit the spot for me.

A couple of notes here: One, this book is by a Canadian author and published by Doubleday Canada, which means it's sort of hard to find in the States. I heard about the book from Books Unbound, a podcast hosted by two Canadian women. I used my university library resources to get it and the copy I borrowed is from a public library in Kansas City, Missouri, which I think is amazing. Also, this book has deckled edges, which I hate more than the fire of a thousand burning suns. So just be aware if you also dislike how impossible it is to turn the pages of a book with deckled edges. 

4/5 stars

Lines of note:

Someone has been in here and changed things. My overflowing magazine rack has vanished. Our battered burgundy leather Morris chairs are gone. In their stead, a pair of slipcovered wing chairs the colour of the smudge you leave behind when you erase something written in pencil. My dark-red velvet sofa has been replaced with a non-colour one, somewhere between stone and sand. Everything in the room has been made neutral. Neutralized. I feel like I'm in one of those crappy home-redecorating shows where the woman comes in at the end and all she can do is say "Oh my god" and cry. (page 10)

Right? I would be horrified if everything in the room was neutral. HORRIFIED.

How did I go through my life and make all these decisions without realizing they were decisions? (page 34)

Do you ever wonder about this yourself? Like, how did I get here? Teenage Me vowed to get out of small town life and guess where I ended up? How did these decisions get made?

"Life is an irresistible force. Like all you want to do is stand still and you keep on getting pulled forward. So I had to get up every day and shave my face and put on clothes and talk to people and pretend to be one of the living. And I guess after a while I forgot I was pretending. And then eventually I started just living again." (page 181)

I like this as a way to think about the way out of grief. 

Hat mentions: None