"The Emotional Anatomy of Murdered Women: A Review of Cathy Ulrich's 'Ghosts of You'" by Roxanne Adams

Ghosts of You is a compilation of 40 short stories written by Cathy Ulrich and published in 2019 by the Los Angeles-based publisher Okay Donkey Press. Each story begins with the exact same line: “The thing about being the murdered [_____] is you set the plot in motion.” The fill-in-the-blank is always a social role, played by a woman. Ulrich originally published these stories in journals and magazines, including Woodbury University’s literary magazine MORIA, and thus Ghosts of You is a collection of those pieces of fiction. MORIA published “Being the Murdered Student” in Issue Three (Spring 2019). Ulrich lives in Montana and is the founding editor of Milk Candy Review, a journal of flash fiction. She is a widely-published author of flash fiction and a beloved presence in the so-called world of “literary Twitter.”
Ghosts of You is written in the second-person and told with a use of language that directs the reader towards the future—“Your children will grow, someday, older than you.” The reader never learns any details about the killers, as these stories are all about the women who were murdered and their survivors, including friends, siblings, children, parents, husbands, and neighbors. In the modern world, we learn so much about murderers. In this collection, Ulrich makes an important cultural and social statement with her choice to focus completely on the victims. Her words are a stark reminder of what ultimately really matters.
In ancient times, particularly with regards to the classical literature of Greece and Rome, grief was often portrayed in a “rather intellectualized manner, with reason considered to be the supreme consoler” (Jackson, 1986, p. 313). In a modern voice, through the persuasive use of fiction, Ulrich speaks of a different kind of grieving experience. Within the pages of Ghosts of You, grief is neither logical nor is it reasonable.
“Being The Murdered Student,” the flash fiction piece that first appeared in MORIA, comprises three short pages, but, in that short span, tells a harrowing story of our modern times—a mother, father, and baby sister left behind after the older daughter is murdered. The mother equates the arrival and departure of sparrows in her front yard with the loss of her daughter:

Your mother will see sparrows in the yard; the yard will be blanketed by sparrows, and she’ll tap her finger against the window, breath fogging the glass, think collective nouns, think knot, quarrel, flutter. She’ll hear your name in the whisper of their chirping mouths, feel the beginning of something leaving the inside of her, a hollowing in her chest, and the phone will ring.

The fact that the metaphor for the daughter are the ever-familiar, ubiquitous, little brown birds of suburban yards and birdbaths means that Ulrich ushers the reader into a world where violence directed against women is also just a plain fact we live with.

In a different story, “Being the Murdered Girl,” the reader is pulled into the world of a murdered teenager:

Your best friend will cry during literature class.  Your boyfriend will see her crying and realize that she’s beautiful. Your best friend and your boyfriend will kiss, for the first time, behind the school, waiting for the bus to come. They’ll be the prom king and queen. They’ll say she would have wanted us to be happy. They’ll come together while your parents are coming apart.

Ghosts of You is the story of dreams that will never come true and lives that are forever altered by the tragedy of someone else’s decision to enact violence. The murdered girl’s boyfriend and her best friend are casual about their betrayal—another form of the violence—and her parents are forever torn apart by the compounding of their loss and grief.
Throughout the entire collection, each new story begins with the title in a similar format. “Being the Murdered Wife” is the second story in the collection. Here, a wife (who is also a mother) is murdered, leaving behind her poet-husband and young children. Presumably, in dealing with his own grief, the poet-husband becomes renowned—awarded and widely respected for his writings. His own parents will raise the children because a “great man like your husband couldn’t be expected to spend his time tending to his murdered wife’s children.” The fragments of a life too short are stark and concise, with the narrator speaking to the dead mother: “Your children will grow, someday, older than you.” The loss perpetuates itself—the way the husband’s success is predicated on the wife’s death leaves the reader questioning the way the world rewards the violence against women.
In “Being the Murdered Lover,” the married lover and his wife are regarded as suspects in the murder. The author pokes an ironic finger at the portrayal of death in the modern age of technology: “Your photograph will be brought out from time to time. There will be two the police like to use in their investigation, the first a selfie that they downloaded from your phone, duck-lipped, squinting.” The duck-lipped selfie isn’t usually the one the dead intend to memorialize themselves with, and that sort of performative moment for social media demands that we consider how we communicate our identity in the current techno-moment—is it yet another form of cultural violence that women purse their lips and bend their bodies into poses that exaggerate and distort their features? Is that a type of self-annihilation?
With the conclusion of “Being the Murdered Lover,” as with all of the other stories in this collection, the endings are vague and uncertain, just as in real life. There are no happy endings or clear-cut resolutions, and this is perhaps the most enduring aspect of Ulrich’s writing. 

Reference

Jackson, S.W. (1986) “Grief, Mourning, and Melancholia.” Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times, Yale UP, pp. 311–324. Retrieved from JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1xp3stn.15. Accessed 9 Apr. 2020. 

Roxanne adams

Roxanne Adams is the current Literature Editor and ASWU Liaison for MORIA Literary Magazine. She lives in North Hollywood in an apartment community that she affectionately calls “The Hotel California,” and she has a lot of as-yet unwritten stories to tell.