"Journalist Laurie Hertzel leads us through her Duluth girlhood amongst ghosts, until the deepest haunting happens when she’s nine, and her brother Bobby dies shockingly. Her family of twelve fractures in silence, but Hertzel knows that memories don’t just live in our shadows, they’re present in our very DNA, making us who we are, even as they keep who we’ve lost alive. Monumentally moving." —Caroline Leavitt, New York Times best-selling author of Days of Wonder and Pictures of You

"This wholesome, complex, and fascinating memoir documents the life of a middle daughter coping with the swirl of nine siblings (one doesn't make it), a dictatorial father, and an overwhelmed mother. Young Laurie Hertzel learns to stay bemused and alert; reading sustains her. By the final chapter, she's exultantly surfaced into the sunshine of ‘those empty spaces we fill with stories.’" —Mark Kramer, founding director, Nieman Program on Narrative Journalism, Harvard University

"In Ghosts of Fourth Street, Laurie Hertzel somehow elegizes not only her own childhood in the 1960s but mine, too. Cars squeaking down snowy streets. Sugary sludge at the bottom of a bowl of Frosted Flakes. The ghost that must be living behind the furnace. How does she remember her childhood so vividly? How does she remember mine? Whatever is universal in twentieth-century American childhood, it’s here." —Melissa Fay Greene, author of Praying for Sheetrock and No Biking in the House Without a Helmet

"Laurie Hertzel lifts the trapdoor and invites us into a mid-century American childhood teeming with snowclouds and striving siblings, restive phantoms, dark sulks and merry feasts. Ghosts of Fourth Street is well-honed and achingly generous—its central tragedy will stick in my chest a long time." —Leif Enger, author of I Cheerfully Refuse