REVIEW

T Guzman’s Ghost Mom is a smart, witty novella-in-flash that brilliantly uses humor and fabulism to explore a son’s grief, his mom’s afterlife, and what it takes for both the living and the dead to move on.

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Guzman’s prose feels so lived in it’s easy to forget you don’t personally know his characters. Told in second person, Ghost Mom invites us to inhabit the point of view of the son as he battles grief: binging classic films at all hours of the night, wishing everyone who’s ever asked him “to call if he needs anything” would just bring him a Snickers, considering getting the mail as a chance to get out of the house. His grief sets the weather of the book, but he is not alone in his liminality. His mom returns as a ghost, curling up on the couch with him, eating popcorn, a late owl, just as she was in life. Mother and son fall into old routines, the son swallowing the impulse to say hard things—I miss you, I love you—the mom, wanting to know when he’s going to fix up his apartment, get a life. Neither able to accept their new normal. We cringe as the son tanks a date with constant discussion of ghost mom. We cheer when ghost mom haunts the jerk in Walmart who used to criticize her English while looking down her shirt, even though such revenge only binds her more to her old life.

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Guzman’s ability to use humor to disarm us, juxtaposing laughs with heavy moments, is simply phenomenal. In the story “Ghost Friend,” we’re treated to a joke about Demi Moore’s Ghost pottery scene mere sentences away from the son’s earnest fear that his birth ruined his mom’s life. In this way, Guzman uses polarity to blur edges and take us deeper and deeper into his characters. Life and death, humor and pain, afterlife chatter against a lifetime of unsaid feelings. At its core, this book is about old hurts, unaired grievances, and a mother-son dynamic that doesn’t change just because one of them has died. The mom has her same need for vindication. The son, the same need to withhold satisfaction. Because why would death change any of that? We are who we are, Guzman suggests. Death changes the terms of life, but something more radical is needed to alter our well-worn patterns, our ability to voice what our hearts need to say most. Guzman’s narrative allows us to sit with that truth, feel haunted by it.

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Book Details

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Ghost Mom can be purchased here.

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Published by Stanchion, this book comprises 48 pages of prose. The volume is deliciously tiny. At 4"X"6, this book is literally pocket-sized and ready to go with you on your next adventure. 

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