At the age of 32, Tara Sidhoo Fraser experienced a stroke linked to a brain condition known as arteriovenous malformation
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When My Ghost Sings: A Memoir of Stroke, Recovery and Transformation
Tara Sidhoo Fraser | Arsenal Pulp Press
$22.95 | 179pp.
Memory is a slippery, uncertain thing, even at the best of times. Do we retrieve memory intact as if playing a video or reconstruct it, with amendments? Most of us, as we age, become even more uncertain about some memories and haunted by others. And it is not just age that makes memory difficult. At a time when fake news and authoritarian propaganda threaten to distort and erase public memories, we face even more challenges to remembrance.
If most of us experience geriatric memory loss at the misdemeanour level, Tara Sidhoo Fraser, the Vancouver-based author of the remarkable memoir When My Ghost Sings, had to deal with it early in her life and at full tilt impact.
Nearly a decade ago, Fraser, then 32, experienced a stroke linked to a brain condition known as arteriovenous malformation, or AVM. The calamitous event left her with little memory of her life before the stroke, and with a disorienting sense that she had stolen her body from her previous self, “the woman I was before the stroke” as she told a CBC interviewer, a self that continued to haunt her in traces of memory embedded in the tissues, organs, and hidden spaces of the body.
As the author tried to stitch together a coherent story for her previous and present lives, she faces not only neurological challenges, but the ever-present puzzles created by the memories of others. She hears different versions of her previous self and personality, and of the key events surrounding her stroke from her ex-lover and from her mother, as well as from the fragmentary and possibly unreliable versions offered by Ghost.
Ghost, for all her elusiveness, becomes an important character in the book, presented with loving precision and appropriate ambiguity.
And the author’s life becomes even more complicated as she begins a new love affair with Jude, a person engaged in their own search for a usable self as they transition beyond the binary.
All this refractory material is reported in Fraser’s memoir. She brings to the story a lyrical, eloquent prose style that is equal to the challenge, and the result is a remarkably beautiful and dreamlike text.
This is Fraser’s first book, although she has published previously in Autostraddle and Anathema magazines. She is currently at work on her first fiction, which she told a recent interviewer will be “very dreamy and very queer.”
Highly recommended.