In the summer, I like to enjoy a few good beach reads. Books you don’t have to think too much about or invest too much of yourself in but that are entertaining and enriching in their own way.
Admittedly, I have been known to pass up the more literary reading selections in the warmer months to reach instead for the easy-to-read page-turners. And that’s the only reason why I didn’t pick up Ghostbread sooner. But I’m glad I finally did, as it’s one of the best books I’ve read in a while.
It was recommended to me a by a friend who explained it was written by a local author, native to the Western, NY region. This alone was enough to pique my interest, but it was my friend’s description of Sonja Livingston’s writing style that made me pick up the book.
Reading about my hometown and the surrounding areas I’ve come to know, the street names and the schools even the weather patterns, felt as comfortable as old pair of worn-in shoes. Yet the places Sonja describes are foreign to me even though I’ve lived here all my life.
Ghostbread is a non-fiction story of Sonja Livingston’s upbringing in the 1970s as one of seven children, most with different fathers, raised by a single mother. “Five girls, five fathers. And only one of us from the man my mother actually married.” Sonja’s siblings seem hardly like brothers and sisters; they are a family loosely held together by the common thread of their unconventional and often disengaged mother. “So many people crowded around the edges of our murky family, it was hard to keep track of who was there or not.”
Sonja takes us to the parts of Western, NY relatively hidden to many of its residents. From an Indian reservation, to a motel room, to a dead-end street in an urban neighborhood, Sonja and her siblings follow their mother around from one place to another, each home only a slight improvement on the last. Despite all the moves, poverty is a constant in their lives.
Sonja writes about her family’s poverty and her desire for bread when night after night dinner consisted of only soup. “Bowl after worn plastic bowl of unfocused ingredients floated before me in strained broth. Corn, carrots, cabbage and whatever else could be found were softened in water and flavored with animal fat. We had soup on the reservation every day, sometimes twice.” Sonja writes, “When you eat soup every night, thoughts of bread get you through.” As Sonja enters high school, life’s challenges continue to mount as she gives up on her schoolwork and sees her chances at college beginning to slip away.
While Sonja’s story is a sad one, it is never self-pitying. It is only an honest story-telling. “I had no father, which sounds much more dramatic than it was. If I’d known girls whose daddies held them tight and gazed at them with so much pride it tore at the eyes, I might have thought that all girls should have such a thing. But I never knew such girls. And how can someone miss what she’s never had?”
Sonja tells us the tale of Ghostbread – bread made in celebration after warding off gagohsa, what the Seneca call a spirit who visits mortals in their dreams. “Light on the tongue and heavy in the stomach, Ghostbread drove the taste of soup away, and was far better than any religion for convincing me of heaven.”
The book’s format of short chapters (some only a single page in length) initially threw me off. It felt at first the story was difficult to get into. But I came to appreciate that each chapter acts as it’s own stand-alone story, many of which were printed as essays in the Iowa Review among others.
