This beautifully cutting and all too real novel about loss, grief and the bonds of family will have your emotions on overdrive. Exploring family grief and what that looks like and the poignant loss of a mother the way this book is told, its as if someone is telling a an old family story. It is hard to believe this is a debut novel.

Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir, the first book from reporter and writer Kat Chow, is undeniably one of the best books you will read this year. Not one of the best nonfiction new releases, not one of the best memoirs; but one of the best books, period. And here’s why …

Loss is a hard thing to read about, an even more difficult thing to write about, and crippling to endure. Chow, however, has an extraordinary ability to put her own personal experiences with grief into words. In Seeing Ghosts, she reflects on the loss of her mother to cancer, while also more broadly examining multigenerational grief throughout her lineage. Digging back into her family history, Chow shares everything from the death of her brother hours after he was born to her mother’s loss of her own mother at age 4. She examines the experiences of family members immigrating to Cuba and the U.S. from China, then relays her own travels to these countries alongside her father as he pursued closure for his own past.

First and foremost, the lens through which Chow sees and shares her mother with the reader is powerfully raw, emotional and real in a way few books are. Her writing will gut you from the very first page, the crisp clarity of her memories providing such detail you will feel as if you were there also. For instance: the unforgettable conversation where her mother once asked to be stuffed, taxidermised if you will, upon her death so she could watch over her daughter even after she was gone. Chow has mastered the ability to voice the painful fallout of loss in all its excruciating detail, capturing the essence of how grief feels with each event along the way, no matter how small. Take for example the well-meaning platitudes offered by others in the early days of loss which only prickled and drew pain, or the moment she realised the sound of her mother’s voice was beginning to slip away in her mind.

Without a doubt Chow conveys how much a mother, both in life and death, shapes a daughter; how inexplicably large her mother’s love looms over the lives she left behind. But she also touches on so much more in these pages. She honestly ruminates on her relationship with her father and her sisters, reflects back upon her parents’ difficult-to-understand marriage. She shares the influence of her familial and cultural beliefs on the family as a whole and on each of them individually. She relays experiences of racism and discrimination, and also criticises how the broken healthcare system in America erects barriers to even those who have health insurance as they are seeking care. And she bravely reveals the “what ifs” which have plagued her for years, the thoughts of how her mother might have been saved if only something else had happened here or someone had done something differently there.

There is something so approachable, so entirely relatable and heartrending, about the stories shared in Seeing Ghosts. The natural flow of the book, as Chow shares piece by piece without following a chronological order, mirrors how memories come and go at random in one’s mind, making it easy to lose yourself within the pages. She also effortlessly captures the many ways grief manifests, the ways we approach and avoid it, the ways it changes and shapes us all. There’s even a bit of hope in the notions that those we’ve lost remain all around us — they continue to express themselves in the traits we’ve inherited through genetics and learned behaviour, in the objects around us, and in our memories, long after their physical bodies are gone.

Chow shares her fear of writing specifically about her mother’s death, her struggle with “exorcising” versus memorialising her mother. But there’s something to say for writing about loss to work through your feelings. Something about how laying one’s grief down on paper gives shape and gravity to the barrage of formless emotions which float around inside the mind. And ultimately, Seeing Ghosts seems to do exactly what Chow’s mother wished for when she requested to be stuffed after her death: it preserves her in a physical form, as well as in the mind and heart, for all the years to come.

I’ve done my best to put the experience of reading this book into words, but all the words in the world will simply fall short. Seeing Ghosts is truly a reading experience you need to feel for yourself.

Included as a top pick in bimonthly August New Releases post, which highlights and promotes upcoming releases of the month (link attached)

EXCERPT: "Chow’s debut memoir Seeing Ghosts narrates the stories of ghosts as they dwell in our consciousness of them, uncovering three generations of family history by carefully examining intergenerational grief."

Full review published in Asia Pacific Arts Magazine online.

I’ve come to look forward to all of Kat Chow’s journalism, and was eagerly awaiting the chance to read her book. It did not disappoint. The same long-form storytelling that makes her journalism is combined was a beautiful lyricism throughout. Kat Chow’s work is so apt for this time of such profound loss.

I don't want to go into too much detail about this memoir because I don't want to spoil it, but it is a must-read. I felt like I was walking through a house that's haunted in a good way. You can tell there's sadness here, but there were good times here as well. Kat Chow is a beautiful, descriptive yet precise writer. Her relationship with her father really pulled me in, especially as someone raised by her mother after a divorce and seeing a different side of a a father-daughter relationship. Such a good book.

This book was very well written but since my mom recently died after a bout of incureable brain cancer I wasn't really in the place for reading about another woman's dealing with the aftermath of her mother's death from cancer

I feel like I’ve been hearing about this book for as long as it’s been in development, because I’m a big-time NPR listener, and Kat Chow, the author of Seeing Ghosts, was a frequent fourth chair on Pop Culture Happy Hour. And therefore, I was so pleased to read an ARC of Seeing Ghosts, a haunting (see what I did there) and engaging memoir of a daughter who lost her mother too soon and her attempts to understand it, heal from it, and go forward.

When Kat Chow was in her tweens, her mother died of cancer. It came on suddenly, to young Kat, but the impact of it, on her family–including her father, also an immigrant–was severe. Kat and her two sisters, who were older, had to relearn their lives without their mother, but something stuck with Kat. She could not forget her mother. She would see her. She would talk to her–and that’s what most of this book is, Kat talking to her mother. Remembering stories from her youth. Asking questions about family histories she was and wasn’t told. She talks about the months leading up to her mother’s death, and the years after–the troubles with finding the right tombstone. And then, she confronts her father, his possible role in her mother’s death, his own aging, and his desire to find the bones of his father, who went to Cuba and left a family behind, and never came back.

This book was really moving, and while it’s “sad” it’s also illuminating in a lot of ways. Chow is a gorgeous, inventive writer, and takes us into her mind and her soul really easily. I did have a few questions about the structural aspects of the book, but I was never too lost. I liked learning about the Chinese-Cuban immigration experience, which I had no idea was even a thing ever, and I recommend this to lovers of memoir.

A 4.3 star read for me!