Why write a ghost story?
I’m at the point in my life as a reader where I crave differentness. I’m reading more novels from other times and from regions that are quite foreign to me, Eastern Europe and Asia, for instance. And increasingly I’m looking for stories told in unusual ways. So I think the urge to try a more eccentric book originates there. I’d actually started another novel, when I saw a scrap of paper beside my reading chair on which, a few days earlier, I’d scratched: Ghost of a suicide. I dropped the other project immediately—I knew this was what I was supposed to work on next. 2. What’s different about your ghost story? First, I wanted to avoid the conventions of ghost fiction. I didn’t want the novel to be about spooking the living, and I didn’t want it to be a fairytale like the movie, Ghost, for instance, where there’s a hugely sentimental moment of contact between the dead guy and his widow. The word “ghost” never appears in the book. All during the time I was writing it, the working title was
