Seeing Ghosts

A Memoir

De: Kat Chow

Narrado por: Kat Chow

This "graceful, captivating" (New York Times Book Review) story from a singular new talent paints a portrait of grief and the search for meaning as told through the prism of three generations of her Chinese American family—perfect for readers of Helen Macdonald and Elizabeth Alexander.

Kat Chow has always been unusually fixated on death. She worried constantly about her parents dying---especially her mother. A vivacious and mischievous woman, Kat's mother made a morbid joke that would haunt her for years to come: when she died, she'd like to be stuffed and displayed in Kat's future apartment in order to always watch over her.

After her mother dies unexpectedly from cancer, Kat, her sisters, and their father are plunged into a debilitating, lonely grief. With a distinct voice that is wry and heartfelt, Kat weaves together a story of the fallout of grief that follows her extended family as they emigrate from China and Hong Kong to Cuba and America. Seeing Ghosts asks what it means to reclaim and tell your family’s story: Is writing an exorcism or is it its own form of preservation? The result is an extraordinary new contribution to the literature of the American family, and a provocative and transformative meditation on who we become facing loss.

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Reseñas de la Crítica

"Journalist Chow writes longingly about her mother, who died from cancer, in this intimate debut about a life shaped by loss. . . While deep emotion drives her writing, Chow generally avoids oversentimentality and buoys what could otherwise be an overwhelmingly despondent narrative with bursts of joy and irreverence. . . The result is a moving depiction of grief at its most mundane and spectacular."—Publishers Weekly

"Kat Chow dares to explore the lingering dynamics of her family’s shared grief in her breathtaking debut memoir. . . It’s a bittersweet meditation on how losing the ones we love indelibly shapes the futures of the living, and how we ultimately find healing in the strength of family."—TIME Magazine

"How do we know our mothers? This seemed to me to be what this powerful memoir brought into focus for me. From the narrow window we have of them from childhood, expanding outward as we grow older, and then after their death, when they cannot keep their secrets from us, including that also, the result is a prismatic vision of the mother in these pages, of Chow's mother, but all our mothers. This is a book that asks us to consider if we allow our mothers to be human--and ourselves, too. A daring, loving, searing debut."—Alexander Chee, bestselling author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“Seeing Ghosts is truly beautiful. A balm. There is such a deep comfort in Kat Chow’s writing, in her remembrance of small things. It is a love song to loss, to family, to the power of writing things down and remembering.”—Jacqueline Woodson, award-winning author of Red at the Bone

"With love and sorrow, Kat Chow's Seeing Ghosts takes up the daunting, difficult, essential task that falls to the children of immigrants—that of making visible the family histories that recede from us like a hazy shoreline, of pulling a lifeline out of the silence that compounds with acquiescence and loss and time. Uncertainty remains central and loss ineluctable, despite the doggedness and perspicacity of Chow’s efforts to uncover and recover; this might be the most human of all the truths in this beautiful, moving memoir.”
—Jia Tolentino, New York Times bestselling author of Trick Mirror

“I read Seeing Ghosts with a great sense of luck and relief that Kat Chow’s book shares the ground with the best memoirs: that they are the archeologists of memory, unearthing places we have wavered in going. Like all books that haunt us long after reading, Seeing Ghosts is a courageous act of excavation and salvage. It is also a feat of rescue and healing.”—Ocean Vuong, New York Times bestselling author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Beautiful book

This book made me both laugh and cry. It made me feel deeply for the author’s experience of loss as well as for my own.

I ended up liking this book much more than I I thought i would

As I started listening to this book, I almost stopped several times, because I just wasn’t feeling a connection to it or the author. I’m glad that I didn’t though because it ended up being a much more profound story of the authors search to find herself, her family and her place, and to understand those things that she did not as a child. It is definitely worth a read/listen to.

An Evolving Story of Grief

Thanks for sharing your story and your culture. I hope it helped you with resolving your grief.

A story of family throughout loss

The debut author navigates through her personal experiences of dealing with the loss of her mother, and the impact it has on her relationship with her father and sisters. Hearing the author's words in her own voice feels as though she is personally telling her story to you.

Real

I loved Kat's patient and raw self examination while addressing her whole family's history with the same vulnerably honest lens. Her language choices were so expressive. A must for anyone reflecting on a passed family member .

Excellent book

Really enjoyed reading this book. Losing a father myself, I love how you have written a lot of your feelings into an excellent memoirs

Horrible and Boring

Horrible book. Its told in the first person by the girl who has mommy issues because he rmom died when she was young. Skip this book.

Interesting start with random detour

As a fellow Asian immigrant reading this book, the book went from a memoir of a lost parent to rambling of someone who clearly can’t relate to her older generation of Asian parents, uncles and grandparents.