When We Were Ghouls: A Memoir of Ghost Stories (American Lives)

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.