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The Weight of Ghosts is a circling of grief following the death of the author’s older son when he was 21, a horror that was compounded by her younger son’s drug use, the country’s slow eruption as it dealt with its own brokenness, and reckoning the author had to do regarding her own story. Weight is a lyrical reclaiming and an insistence by the author that she own the rights to her story, which is American flavored with an unreleasing elsewhere. Weight is an immigrant story and a love story. While it is raw and honest and tragic, it is also a hopeful, funny, and original telling that demonstrates the strength of the human spirit, while offering a vocabulary for these most unmanageable human experiences.
“Equal parts devastating and life-affirming, Laila Halaby's memoir offers wisdom and truth for everyone who has ever moved through a difficult time and shredded a skin to adapt. There are many layers to this story, all tied together by the clear, poetic language that is as musical as the birdsong that accompanies Halaby on her healing walks around Tucson. The Weight of Ghosts is a brave and remarkable achievement.”—Alice Elliott Dark, author of Fellowship Point and In the Gloaming
“Beautiful and heartbreaking.”—Randa Jarrar, author of Love Is An Ex-Country
"The Weight of Ghosts is a hauntingly beautiful memoir, painstakingly attentive to the eddies of grief and the signs of regeneration, and a testament to the power of language to reconnect us with what we have lost." —The Markaz Review
"The Weight of Ghosts is complex, layered, and sometimes messy, as grief is, but this memoir offers readers a deeply affecting, lyrical and often profound journey into the experience of love and loss." —New York Journal of Books