Nine short stories each featuring a different kind of ghost, all but one having a very definite effect on the world and on the story's female protagonist (the exception being "Counting Sheep" unless, perhaps, the true ghost in that one is either Wordsworth or some version of academic/institutional/patriarchal expectation) and all with no exceptions situating the haunting at some aspect of female experience.
Many of those hauntings could be universal in nature, but have a particular female 'coding' that Lurie works through deliberately (eg the female narrator's haunting by fat people in the story of the same name, or the suggestion of future haunting of the (again female) narrator in "Another Halloween" because of a (objectively definitely not owed) perceived obligation of female friendship not discharged to another woman - the other sites/triggers of haunting being a woman's imminent marriage to a controlling and misogynist man, another's relationship with her house and tradespeople remodelling it, a piece of antique furniture, a reluctance to commit to a man (with jewellery thrown in), pregnancy, and talent and identity). Eminently readable, even if not as terrific as I remember Love & Friendship and Foreign Affairs as having been.
Many of those hauntings could be universal in nature, but have a particular female 'coding' that Lurie works through deliberately (eg the female narrator's haunting by fat people in the story of the same name, or the suggestion of future haunting of the (again female) narrator in "Another Halloween" because of a (objectively definitely not owed) perceived obligation of female friendship not discharged to another woman - the other sites/triggers of haunting being a woman's imminent marriage to a controlling and misogynist man, another's relationship with her house and tradespeople remodelling it, a piece of antique furniture, a reluctance to commit to a man (with jewellery thrown in), pregnancy, and talent and identity). Eminently readable, even if not as terrific as I remember Love & Friendship and Foreign Affairs as having been.
