Giving Up the Ghost

June 15, 2012
An original, deeply moving memoir about how a man's quest to understand the supernatural led him to confront his own haunted past. Writer and NPR executive Nuzum was a young teenager growing up in Ohio when he encountered his first ghost, a little girl in a blue dress who appeared to him in his dreams. As he grew up, the author became convinced that the girl "was a harbinger of my own self-destruction." Perhaps she was. By the time Nuzum was 18, he was a "doped-up, undependable, unpredictable mess" who actively courted suicide. His bizarre, sometimes violent behavior eventually landed him in a psychiatric ward. When medical intervention failed, a beautiful and unconventional friend named Laura helped pull him back from the brink. But as he healed, their complex, enigmatic relationship faltered; soon he lost track of her altogether. Then, during his first year back at college, he received word that Laura had died after getting hit by a car. Although Nuzum moved on with his life, he remained permanently marked by his experiences. Closed doors still frightened him because they could "have ghosts hiding behind them." Determined to confront his fears, he began investigating famous haunted places across America. His occasionally humorous encounters with the spirit world did nothing to cure his phobia, but they did push him into a reckoning with his past and with the ghost of Laura. An elegiac testament to friendship, love and survival.

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July 1, 2012
Nuzum, who now works for NPR, reveals in this brutally honest memoir the details of his lifelong fear of ghosts. It began as he entered his teens in Canton, Ohio, and had dreams about a wolf guy and the Little Girl in a Blue Dress, who he was convinced lived in the attic. In his twenties, he was a doped-up, undependable, unpredictable mess who thought he was being followed around by a dead girl he didn't know. He was eventually admitted to the mental ward of a local hospital. Later he enrolled at Kent State, and his Little Girl dreams gradually subsided and were replaced by sporadic concerns about the presence of ghosts that still linger today. Nuzum tells a parallel story about a girl who became his best friend through his troubled years. When he learned of her untimely death several years after she moved to New York City, he realized he never really knew her, though she knew everything about him. An evocative glimpse into one man's past, so different from what his normal present would suggest.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)