When We Were Ghouls

A Memoir of Ghost Stories

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Pub Date Mar 01 2018 | Archive Date Mar 01 2018

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Description

When Amy E. Wallen’s southern, blue-collar, peripatetic family was transferred from Ely, Nevada, to Lagos, Nigeria, she had just turned seven. From Nevada to Nigeria and on to Peru, Bolivia, and Oklahoma, the family wandered the world, living in a state of constant upheaval. When We Were Ghouls follows Wallen’s recollections of her family who, like ghosts, came and went and slipped through her fingers, rendering her memories unclear. Were they a family of grave robbers, as her memory of the pillaging of a pre-Incan grave site indicates? Are they, as the author’s mother posits, “hideous people?” Or is Wallen’s memory out of focus?

In this quick-paced and riveting narrative, Wallen exorcizes these haunted memories to clarify the nature of her family and, by extension, her own character. Plumbing the slipperiness of memory and confronting what it means to be a “good” human, When We Were Ghouls links the fear of loss and mortality to childhood ideas of permanence. It is a story about family, surely, but it is also a representation of how a combination of innocence and denial can cause us to neglect our most precious earthly treasures: not just our children but the artifacts of humanity and humanity itself.
 

When Amy E. Wallen’s southern, blue-collar, peripatetic family was transferred from Ely, Nevada, to Lagos, Nigeria, she had just turned seven. From Nevada to Nigeria and on to Peru, Bolivia, and...


Advance Praise

“Amy Wallen’s beautiful memoir, replete with fantastic stories, will carry you across continents and introduce you to amazing characters. With wit and poignant honesty, she recounts the details of her unlikely, unforgettable childhood and brings to life the era that shaped our present.”—Claire Messud, New York Times bestselling author of The Emperor’s Children

“In this bold, original, and exquisitely written memoir, Wallen explores the reliability of haunting memories that include ‘play days’ when her Nigerian grade school is closed due to public executions and a family outing that involves robbing an ancient Peruvian grave. . . . Along the way, Wallen lays bare her family’s foibles with tender fearlessness. Although often about death, this memoir is full of life and life’s oppositions, both the light and the dark, which the author ultimately learns to embrace and celebrate.”—Sue William Silverman, author of The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew

“The loneliness of childhood, fears of abandonment, and early sorrows, but also its magical escapes and restorations are captivatingly rendered in this haunting, exquisitely written memoir. Skulls, executions, bloated corpses, Siamese twins, and Godzilla movies manifest themselves uncannily, but also Santa Claus, an adored brother, a loving nanny, a beautiful mother, and an understanding if peripatetic father, making for a perfect balance of dark and light forces in this memory palace.”—Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait inside My Head and Against Joie de Vivre

“A worldly gazetteer of haunted family stories. There’s sadness, mortality, tragedy, love, frenzy, tremendous restlessness, grave robbing, family secrets. Really, I’ve never read a memoir as uncannily provocative as this one! It’s as if the spectral world has finally found a home in the incidents found on every page. Amy Wallen has what Virginia Woolf called ‘a Gothic memory.’”—Howard Norman, author of My Darling Detective

“Amy Wallen’s beautiful memoir, replete with fantastic stories, will carry you across continents and introduce you to amazing characters. With wit and poignant honesty, she recounts the details of...


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9780803296954
PRICE $19.95 (USD)
PAGES 294

Average rating from 9 members


Featured Reviews

I am a sucker for a good title and a good cover and this book definitely had both. The book itself was less desirable. The writing is pretty good but I didn’t find the story of the authors life too interesting. I think that maybe this simply isn’t my kind of book.

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The author Amy Wallen had an interesting childhood. Her father worked for an oil company so travel throughout the world was necessary. She went from a small town in Nevada to Nigeria to Peru to Bolivia.
Amy's story gives us an insight into living in these places. It also gives us a glance into her thoughts growing up. She always seemed to feel alone and worried she would be forgotten by everyone.
I am just a few years older than Amy and I know and recognize what she talks about. I did enjoy the journey into her world.

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Amy Wallen's life has been anything but ordinary. Nevada, Nigeria, Peru, Bolivia and Oklahoma. Theses are the travels of a journalist, this was the life of a little girl and her family. Much of this is questioning her own memories versus what really happened and what really happened to what she believed.

This is about ghosts and ghouls, but more about the ghosts of our own lives, our own past.

Thanks to NetGalley, Amy Wallen and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book.

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when we were ghouls by Amy e wallen.
In this quick-paced and riveting narrative, Wallen exorcizes these haunted memories to clarify the nature of her family and, by extension, her own character. Plumbing the slipperiness of memory and confronting what it means to be a “good” human, When We Were Ghouls links the fear of loss and mortality to childhood ideas of permanence. It is a story about family, surely, but it is also a representation of how a combination of innocence and denial can cause us to neglect our most precious earthly treasures: not just our children but the artifacts of humanity and humanity itself.
 This was a good read. although I found it slow in places. I liked the story Amy wrote. 4*.

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A memoir written by a woman trying to verify her strange memories of occasional grave robbing with her family growing up with frequent moves to unusual destinations, and some really odd memories that she can’t seem to decide if they are real or fantasy. Her siblings aren’t much help in sorting it out, so she tries fact-checking what she can on the internet and with maps, but ultimately she has to ask her parents to get the true story and she can’t wait much longer as they are already up in years, and her father is quickly losing his memory to illness. She needs to know soon, before its too late. Did they really disturb an actual grave of a prince who was buried with his faithful dog beside him? And after taking pieces of pottery and cloth that the man was buried in, along with the metal that had adorned his head...did the diggers scurry back after they left to grab the real prize, the gold buried under the body that Amy and her family has apparently been ignorant of? Being happy with their stolen trinkets (which was a serious enough crime) and may have cursed the family as it was.

An advance digital copy was provided by NetGalley, Amy E. Wallen, and the University of Nebraska Press for my review. Date of publication March 1, 2018

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I really enjoyed this book. As the teacher in charge of stocking the senior school library, I like to ensure that the books are diverse and the students are exposed to both excellent fiction and excellent modern non-fiction. I think that this is both a fascinating and well-written book that has much to recommend it and will keep the students interests. It is good to stretch their reading interests by providing them with books about subjects they might never have considered before and this definitely does the job well. It is also good to find books that I know the teaching staff might enjoy as well as the students and I definitely think that this applies in both cases. Absolutely recommend wholeheartedly; a fantastic read.

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This was a very interesting book. The author did an amazing job of put down her thoughts and feelings of growing up in foreign lands and cultures. The emotions that came through were insightful, and the description of the different cultures through the eyes of child were interesting. The author showed how people remember things differently and as we grow old the memories sometimes change. A truly interesting book.

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I think I was expecting something less white people privilege and something more macabre. Wallen was not a happy child and it seems like for good reason but failed to really engage me since she didn't really seem to confront her privilege beyond acknowledging it. I mean, I get it that when you feel so neglected and unthought of, it really is what colors everything in your life but it felt like there was another story that could've been here too. A skull in your pantry is not as macabre as it is completely rude to the human being and culture that buried it but maybe I felt that because I'm an archaeologist keenly set on ethical treatment of remains.

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