ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe enormous gratitude to Masie Cochran, my brilliant, intuitive editor whose vision and passion for Ghost Songs has never flagged. Heartfelt thanks, too, to my agents, Ellen Levine and Alexa Stark at Trident Media Group, for believing in this memoir and so tirelessly working on its behalf. I owe so much to everyone at Tin House Books: Nanci McCloskey, Diane Chonette, Meg Cassidy, Sabrina Wise, Meg Storey. Much gratitude also to Anne Horowitz.
Thanks are owed to many people who have contributed feedback and/or support during the slow evolution of this book: Tracy Handley, Jane Lury, Scott Stephens, Hope Brennan, Rita Gabis, Jenna Johnson, Joy Harris, Sarah Twombly, Terra Chalberg, Bill Clegg, and Thom Taylor.
Deepest gratitude of all goes to my husband, Neil, and my daughter, Miranda. I am so privileged to share my life with you both.
Book Club Questions:
Ghost Songs is brimming with stories from Regina’s childhood. Which flashbacks were the most memorable for you? Which were the most shocking, the most hopeful, the happiest?
Do you believe in the ghosts in Ghost Songs or do you chalk Regina’s visions up to posttraumatic stress and grief?
Regina begins her memoir remembering a time at a college party when two actors called her Lady Ophelia. Why do you think she opens with this story, and how does it set the stage for the rest of the memoir?
Oceans play an important role in Ghost Songs. What impact does the move to the dry landscape of New Mexico have on Regina and her family?
What did Regina’s parents feel about Ireland, the country they’d never been to? Why does Regina move to Ireland? What does she hope to find there?
What does Yeats Country mean to Regina? Do you wish she had made it there? Why? Why do you think she didn’t go?
Describe Regina’s relationship to her siblings and discuss the role they played in one another’s lives.
What character traits—both positive and negative—do you think Regina inherited from her parents? And how do you think those traits shaped her early adulthood?
What does the title Ghost Songs mean to you?
Despite her grief, it never feels as though Regina blames her parents. Were you able to be equally nonjudgmental?
The cover of Ghost Songs is a photograph from Regina’s parents’ wedding day. How does this photograph and the art around it make you feel?
PRAISE FOR Ghost Songs
“In Regina McBride’s Ghost Songs there is a mysterious alchemy at play. With a subtle hand, McBride transforms personal horror into poetic myth. In writing this story that happened to her in real time, she creates a book that feels timeless. I was under its spell from word one.”
—ALICE SEBOLD, author of Lucky
“Dubbed a literary Maeve Binchy by an LJ reviewer for her affecting, lyrical fiction (e.g., The Nature of Water and Air), McBride will make you sit up straight with this startling memoir, grounded in singular sorrow: her parents committed suicide one after the other when she was only seventeen. McBride’s subsequent hunt for comfort and belonging took her from New York to New Mexico to Ireland, where she reconnected with her roots and the gorgeous Irish lore that informs her writing. Yet she still had to contend with the painful recognition that Catholicism regards suicides as unpardonable sin.”
—Library Journal, Barbara Hoffert
“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, winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Award
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REGINA McBRIDE is the author of four novels and one book of poetry and the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is an adjunct professor of English at Hunter College in New York City, where she teaches creative writing.
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.
Copyright © 2016 Regina McBride
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact:
Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.
Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon and Brooklyn, New York
Distributed by W. W. Norton and Company.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: McBride, Regina, 1956- author.
Title: Ghost songs : a memoir / Regina McBride.
Description: 1st U.S. edition. | Portland, OR : Tin House Books,
2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016006743 (print) | LCCN 2016018549
(ebook) | ISBN
9781941040430 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781941040447
Subjects: LCSH: McBride, Regina, 1956- | Authors,
American--20th
century--Biography.
Classification: LCC PS3563.C333628 Z46 2016 (print) | LCC PS3563.C333628
(ebook) | DDC 813/.54 [B] --dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016006743
First US edition 2016
Interior design by Diane Chonette
www.tinhouse.com
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