THE WEIGHT OF GHOSTS

A writer and oncology counselor reflects on how the death of her oldest son helped her own a personal story that had “always felt like a lie.”

The illegitimate daughter of a white mother and a Jordanian father, Halaby, author of two novels and two collections of poetry, felt that she was a “fiction…squished between other people’s tall tales.” Many years later, when her son Raad was killed in a car accident, the author was forced to redefine the true and singular nature of her “borders” with the world. As a counselor, Halaby had spent most of her professional life emotionally insulated, a “ghost” who listened to the traumas of her clients but never had to reveal her own pain. The fictions that had rendered her invisible began in childhood, when her single mother “insisted that I was Caucasian,” then “fill[ed] my head with myth of white privilege and superiority.” That “certitude” did not save Halaby, who lived in the “impossible homelands” of cultural in-betweenness, from being alternately judged and claimed by both white and brown people. In its implacable reality, the grief she experienced after Raad’s death changed everything. Cracks developed in her relationship with a white partner who, while offering love, also criticized Arab cultures without fully knowing them. “Boundaries are different with white people,” she writes. “Boundaries are different with men.” The author sought to better understand the components of her own life: a 17-year marriage that ended in divorce; a younger son who was “in and out of rehab”; the impotent rage she felt alongside the grief she tried to blunt with medicine “to keep from spending the afternoon on the kitchen floor.” In this raw, poetic, and relentlessly probing narrative, Halaby plumbs the depths of loss while attempting to piece together the “puzzle” of a life born at the crossroads of clashing multiethnic truths and fictions.

A fiercely authentic memoir.