This is going to be a little bit of an odd “review” of a book I just finished because I’m pretty sure it’s going to veer into “talking about me” territory in a way that I try to avoid.

I’ve had Eric Nuzum’s Giving Up the Ghost: A Story About Friendship, 80s Rock, a Lost Scrap of Paper, and What It Means to be Haunted on my Amazon wishlist and “to read” list for so long I can’t remember when I added it or how I even heard of it. It was one of those books that I considered and might have moved toward my cart every once in a while but then for whatever reason put back in favor of a newer book, an album, or a movie. Last week, though, I was going through the spreadsheet that is my “to read” list and I noticed that it was the only book on the entire list that I had to buy in order to read (the rest are books I own or that are available at the library). I had an Amazon gift card, it was available as an eBook, so I bought it and started reading it right away in a “let’s get this one checked off” sense as well as curiosity because I had no idea what to expect.

Yes, yes, I could have read the blurb on Amazon or Goodreads again, but I was preserving the reading experience by going in blind (which is a nice way to say that I was too lazy to do so).

Anyway, the book (published in 2012) is a memoir that centers around Nuzum’s teenage years in Canton, Ohio during the 1980s, especially a friendship he had with a girl named Laura. We find out early on that Laura died a couple of decades earlier, and the narrative flips back and forth between that time in the past and the current day, where Nuzum is taking a road trip to various famous “haunted” places (Gettysburg, the prison where The Shawshank Redemption was filmed). The idea is to see those ghosts and experience the hauntings, mainly because ever since he was younger, he has had some frightening visions of a little blonde-haired girl in a blue dress. When he’s in the “now”, he details that road trip but as we keep going through the book, he keeps coming back to Laura and what becomes several mysteries surrounding her and their friendship.

Now, if this is what the book was only about, I’m pretty sure it would be worth reading, but the thing that becomes the real story is teenage Eric and a substance abuse problem and mental breakdown that eventually gets him institutionalized. He’s one of the guys in the crowd that when I was in high school, we called “scrubs” or whom would have made up the “freaks” in Freaks and Geeks (although I was actually picturing either Crispin Glover or Keanu Reeves from River’s Edge). He’s angry all the time; usually inebriated in some form; listens to the punk, hardcore, and alternative of the day; and has a litany of problems that do eventually come to a head. And to be honest, he’s kind of an asshole and I found myself repeatedly frustrated as I read his story.

So what was it that kept me flying through this book? Moreover, why did I get so attached to him?

The answer to the first question is Laura. She’s the type of person that I think that every writer who has ever written a manic pixie dream girl has wished they could have been friends with (although she’s much cooler than your average MPDG), and the deeper that Eric goes into fighting with his demons, the more she sticks by him and the more I wanted to see how the relationship ended. The other reason is that I weirdly identified with him. I say weirdly because when I was a teenager, I was the his polar opposite: a rules-following honors student who was deathly afraid of getting in trouble, rarely, if ever, touched any sort of illicit substance, and was more Billy Joel than Dead Kennedys. There were a lot of guys like Eric at my high school and I was usually intimidated by them (and may have been condescending at times as well). But as I was reading about night after night of he and Laura hanging out at some random place around Canton, then their separation, and her death, I had one of those moments of empathy where something from my own life just fell into place.

I wrote about my old friend Vanessa very briefly in a Pop Culture Affidvit entry back in March of 2010 that was about the Lisa Loeb and Nine Stories song “Stay (I Missed You).” She was a year ahead of me in high school and we became really close via suffering through the same physics class when I was a junior. I kind of had a crush on her but more importantly was grateful to have bonded so much with a fellow nerd. It was everything PG that the relationship that Eric and Laura have was not, and the Lisa Loeb song had started as a silly joke between the two of us when we hung out a lot during the summer of 1994, then kind of became a thing. She headed to Brown in September of that year and I saw her maybe once or twice before I graduated high school and headed south to Baltimore to attend Loyola.

The next time I saw Vanessa was right after she had graduated from Brown. I can’t remember how I reached out to her (I might have actually written her a letter because I’d forgotten her phone number) and we had lunch a couple of days before she moved across the country to Seattle. She’d changed a lot physically–her head was completely shaven and her legs were hairy and while I don’t want to assume anything, hindsight makes me wonder if she was nonbinary or transgender. I think at the time I just found it a little odd and didn’t think of it beyond that; it was 1998 and I was a pretty naive 21. Anyway, we had one of those afternoons together that felt as if it could have been four years earlier. Nothing seemed to have changed between us and I’m glad that we did because it was the last time I ever saw her.

Sometime in the spring of 2000, a friend from high school emailed me to let me know that she had heard that Vanessa had died by suicide. A couple of phone calls to other friends and I learned that it had been about a month prior; eventually, I’d find out the “story” behind it, which I don’t feel like going into. A few weeks after I found out, I had a really vivid dream where the two of us were hanging out in our high school gym, and while I don’t remember any details (especially why we were in the gym of all places), I remember waking up feeling a little weirded out but also really happy. My girlfriend (who is now my wife) told me that perhaps she’d come to say goodbye in some way, and even though thinking that simply soothes my ego, I believe that’s what it was.

There’s a point in the book where Eric finds out about Laura’s death (and no, she did not die by suicide) and eventually goes “looking” for clues about her. While I was reading that, memories of Vanessa that I hadn’t thought of in years came rushing back, and I finished the book feeling really affected. And yes, I listened to “Stay (I Missed You)”. I guess I just didn’t expect to have a connection to people in a book who were so much different than I as

I have thrown a lot of my high school stuff away in recent years, but the letter that she wrote me when she went away to college is tucked inside the yearbook from my junior year along with a few pictures of us from that summer. I don’t think I’ll ever get rid of those, or to steal a phrase from this book, give up that ghost, but I’m thankful that I write this tonight thinking about her.