Review by Diane Gottlieb
Regal House Publishing / October 2021 / 236 pp
There are ghosts in the room. Every room. They’re in the eaves in the attic, the crawlspaces in the basement, the living room, the kitchen, the den. Spirits haunt our lives through memories, the unconscious mind, our genes. Our parents, and their parents before them, gift us with strengths, joys, and pain. It is those past pains, past fears, that often stop us in our tracks.
As the conversation around intergenerational trauma deepens, ghosts and hauntings infiltrate memoir and expand its boundaries. Laraine Herring’s A Constellation of Ghosts: A Speculative Memoir with Ravens continues this expansion soulfully.
Herring is in a terrific position to take on such a venture. The author of eight previous books, she is a Jungian-trained psychotherapist whose specialty is grief. She has also struggled with colon cancer. While she undergoes treatment, her deceased father, in the form of a raven, comes to her hospital bed. A Constellation of Ghosts is the result: a beautiful, moving, and deeply layered exploration of grief: how and why we hold on to what we love, and how we can let go.
Herring’s memoir is of two minds, just as Herring finds herself while reckoning with the word and implications of cancer. There’s what Herring calls her “shadow self,” the one who speaks to doctors and pays the bills, who manages herself in the world. We might see this Herring as practical and competent, but on a closer look, we recognize the proverbial good girl, the obedient woman, raised and well-versed in the rules of patriarchy. This good girl silences herself and her intuition, makes herself small. We follow “shadow” Herring through her toxic relationship with her abusive ex-husband, as she drops seven clothes sizes to take up less space. We watch as she “Yeses” the medical establishment, which communicates through jargon and often strips those most vulnerable of agency.
Thankfully, there is Herring’s other self, the one who speaks to ravens, the one who is ultimately more “real.” She has kept that most authentic self hidden under layers of earth and flesh. But the rich soil of her life has been feeding these roots all along. The cancer diagnosis, the surgery, broke through the hard ground. Enter Herring’s raven father. Using a play-like structure within the memoir, Herring converses with the raven, who helps her grieve and learn to let go: “Look, daughter, look, I am far away you cannot stay … say it now unpack your throat put down this script don’t hesitate there’s only so much time you will have breath to walk on feet on broken shifting earth.”
Language is a powerful motif throughout the book. There are the lists Herring’s shadow self creates to deal with her new diagnosis, the same lists, Herring realizes, she made as a seven-year-old, after her father’s first heart attack. There are the medical codes, which feel like a series of betrayals: “The codes are a slammed door. They are about me, but I am denied access to their meaning. The doctors are using my super-power—words—to alienate me … With all of the possible tragic outcomes, I never considered the inevitable one: language—my always and forever safe house—could turn on me.”
That language suggests Herring turn on her cancer by “kicking its ass.” But Herring knows this isn’t the way: “I didn’t want to put cancer on high alert. I didn’t want it to be preparing for a battle with me—an opponent unskilled at war … For a cancer cell to change, it must learn a new expression of its DNA. For a father to become a raven, he must embrace a new form. For a daughter to understand her own cancer and her own grief, she must learn a new way to write.”
And so she does. Her lyricism sings as she navigates the liminal spaces, swimming between the realms of the dead and the living. She writes to her father: “I hope your Death had soft arms, honeysuckle breath, and a Southern accent … The sun is setting … You are dead, and I have outrun my Death, for now.”
Deep generosity abides within these pages. Herring does not blame, but, rather, names, states, lyrically calls out with gut-wrenching honesty. While reading, I sometimes thought Herring was speaking directly to me. She and I eerily share several similar life events, but, I imagine, any woman reading this book would feel the same, as would anyone dealing with grief. Herring’s words speak universal truths, cutting to the heart of the matter with great precision. While her words sometimes hurt, they also heal. As we share her experience, we, too, learn and grow.
The pathway through grief is not straight, not linear. It is not rational, nor of this world. Speculative memoir is the perfect mode for writing about grief, and A Constellation of Ghosts embodies the genre at its best. Herring writes from the voice of her raven dad and from the voices of his parents. She writes about invisibility, about the illusion of safety, about commitments to a ghost, a father, even to cancer. Herring’s father, this magical raven, journeys along with Herring, holding space as she comes to realize all she needs to do to honor her most sacred commitment—to living.
Diane Gottlieb’s writing has appeared in Atlas + Alice, Bending Genres, 100-Word Story, The Rumpus, Hippocampus, and Entropy, among others, and has been anthologized in And If That Mockingbird Don't Sing. She is the winner of Tiferet’s 2021 Writing Contest in nonfiction and is the 2021 Dancing in the Rain fellow at the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow. Diane is Prose/CNF Editor of Emerge Literary Journal. Find her at dianegottlieb.com and on Twitter @DianeGotAuthor.