Author Julie Gilbert Discusses the Writing of Her New Book ‘Giant Love’
Julie Gilbert Today, we delve into the enduring relevance of the themes explored by Pulitzer Prize -winning author Edna Ferber
Despite writing a novel about ghosts, I do not profess to be a ghost expert. But I do know that every April, my family gathers at multiple cemeteries across New York and New Jersey to pay their respects to our grandparents, parents, uncles, and aunties that have passed. We burn gold-flecked paper and “hell notes” (afterlife currency) to line the pockets of our dearly departed. We talk to the gravestones while pouring tea and rice wine along the grass, and our ancestors drink from the earth. To call these ancestral spirits “ghosts” is weirdly diminishing, but it is the Western catch-all definition for all non-corporeal matter who visit us in the living plane. Which is to say that whatever understanding of ghostly life or unlife we know will always be an inexact translation. Which is to also say that somewhere within that imprecision, the afterlife is closer to us than we think. Naturally, such rituals with ghosts would come to shape the rules of haunting within How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster . In shaping the world of the novel, in which ghosts are not merely decorative side characters but crucial figures in a not-so-distant future, in a city plagued by weekly acid rainstorms, I ask myself: What if the ghosts we encounter in stories are neither objects of terror nor spirits requiring exorcism? What if a perpetual life with ghosts can radically alter the life of the living? I believe that ghosts are not merely here to haunt, but to shift the ways in which we see the parameters of a life. To write a convincing ghost, especially one whose place in a fantastical world of endless disaster can fade into the background, I have found the following guidelines to be useful for representing their unlife on the page. Rule #1: Ghosts Never Stay Still While ghosts may appear bound to the house, the cursed cemetery, or site of unresolved interest, a ghost by nature is porous; they slip through the cracks between planes. In Koji Suzuki’s Ring (1991) (later adapted into the […]
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Julie Gilbert Today, we delve into the enduring relevance of the themes explored by Pulitzer Prize -winning author Edna Ferber
The Mallorcan Joana Marcús is a young bestseller in Spain and America, writer of young adult novels with a romantic
