The Weight of Ghosts by Laila Halaby
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.