I Wrote About My Mother’s Suicide and Found My Own Voice Instead
What happens when a professional ghostwriter, who has spent twenty years giving voice to others, is forced to confront her own story following her mother’s suicide? In this deeply moving episode, Emmy Award-winning producer and bestselling author Samantha Rose joins the show to discuss her award-winning memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. Samantha shares the tender, complicated journey of navigating her mother’s unexpected death by suicide—a tragedy that shattered her world and challenged her relationship with the truth. From the “constellation of questions” left in the wake of loss to the liberating power of saying the “scary thing” out loud, Sam explores how she moved from betrayal and anger into a space of compassion and rebirth. The conversation also delves into the fascinating world of automatic writing and dream visitation, revealing how Sam reclaimed her own voice after decades in the shadows.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL HEAR ABOUT THINGS LIKE:
- The shocking contrast between Samantha’s mother’s vibrant public persona and the hidden mental health struggles that led to her death by suicide.
- Why “saying the scary thing out loud” is a mechanical necessity for breaking generational secrets and beginning true healing.
- The professional and personal transition from being a “ghost” for others to becoming the primary narrator of her own life.
- The concept of “clean grief” vs. “muddy grief” and how to push past the “how and why” to reach a place of simple missing.
- How writing acts as a physical channel to move grief out of the body’s nervous system.
- Samantha’s surprising experiences with automatic writing and dream visitations as a way to continue the dialogue with her mother.
- Advice for parents on how to handle the “script” of tragedy with children by choosing honesty over ambiguity.
SOME QUESTIONS IRENE ASKS SAMANTHA:
- Going back to your childhood, what was your relationship with your mother like, and how did her mental health shape the world you grew up in?
- How has your understanding of your mother’s story evolved over time?
- Why do you believe it’s so important to say that scary thing out loud, especially when it comes to mental health and generational stories?
- How has honesty become a lifeline for you in your own mental health journey?
- How do we know when it’s the right time to tell our children the fuller truth about our lives?
- How has automatic writing shaped your connection with your mother?
- Does healing mean the pain disappears?
- Your mantra is, “Open the door. See what comes through.” What does joy look like for you now?
If this conversation speaks to your heart, we’d love to share something special with you.
The first 5 people to follow Samantha on Instagram @samantharose_writer and send her a DM with the message “Grief and Rebirth” will receive a signed copy of Giving Up the Ghost: A Daughter’s Memoir.
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I Wrote About My Mother’s Suicide and Found My Own Voice Instead
I hope this message finds each of you very well. I’m speaking to you from my studio in West Orange, New Jersey. I could not be more delighted to welcome Samantha Rose, who has quietly powered the stories of many others and who is now stepping forward to share her own story. Samantha is an Emmy Award-Winning Television Producer, a New York Times, USA Today, and internationally bestselling ghost writer of nearly twenty books with work featured in outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Oprah, and Harper’s Bazaar.
She is also the principal of Yellow Sky Media, a boutique editorial agency based in Petaluma, California where she lives with her son. Sam’s memoir titled, Giving Up the Ghost is the first book she has written under her own name. It is the winner of Best Memoir at the 2025 San Francisco Book Festival. In writing it, Sam discovered something unexpected. That the story she thought she was telling about her mother’s death by suicide was in truth. A story about her old grief, healing, and rebirth.
I’m looking forward to talking with Sam about the tender complicated terrain of mother-daughter relationships, the courage it takes to speak truths that once felt too frightening to say aloud and the way that honesty can become a lifeline in the landscape of mental health. We’ll also explore the layered non-linear grief that’s around suicide. A grief that asks us again and again to return to ourselves with compassion.
For nearly twenty years, Sam has helped other people give voice to their lives. Now, she’s stepping out from behind the curtain. Not as a ghost writer and not as a ghost in her own story, but as a woman reclaiming her voice, her narrative, and her place in the world. What’s up, Sam? Speaking of a place in the world, welcome to your place in the world.
Thank you so much for that lovely introduction. I’m very happy to be here.
I’m so happy to have you here, too. It’s so lovely to get to know you. Let’s have everybody else get to know you a little bit. We can start from the beginning. Do you want to take us back to your childhood, your relationship with your mom? Did she have mental health issues in the early days that shaped the world you grew up in?
The Hidden Truth: A Mother’s Legacy and a Daughter’s Discovery
The answer to that is she did not. My mom’s name was Susan Swartz. She was a journalist and author in her own right. She was a radio personality. She wrote plays. She was a big voice in Sonoma County, where I grew up. I was dazzled by my mom throughout my life. She was a light force and curious with the world, and engaged.
I was lucky to have a lovely relationship with her. I know not everyone has that relationship with their mom. I want to honor that and I’m so grateful I did. She did not indicate any mental illness or struggle throughout my entire life. That was one of the things I went back, looked for and tried to write into in the book. That’s one of the reasons why her death was so shocking. Not just to me, but to the wider community here of people who knew her.
It must have been terrible. How has your understanding of your mother’s story evolved over time? How did it affect you and where it came from?
That’s one of the things I aim to look at with Giving Up the Ghost. It was to entangle a lot of the questions that were left behind by her death. Suicide brings up a list of questions like, how, when, why, where, what could I have done, what did I miss, what was I miss seeing, and what was she not showing? That was the beginning of the writing process for me. I didn’t start out with the intention of writing a book or a memoir. It was a way for me to process what had happened.
That helped you with that book to honestly talk about what you went through and what it’s been like for you, which became a lifeline for you. Why do you believe it’s so important to say that scary thing out loud? Especially when it comes to these generational stories and what you’re doing with your mom’s story.
I was critical after she died that she had been withholding a lot of truth. She had been side-stepping some real important facts about her mental health and I resented her for that. I resented her for not being honest.
It must have felt like a betrayal because you were so close to each other. You’re like, “Mom, why didn’t you turn to me or why didn’t you talk to me?”
Exactly. I had a lot of betrayal. I was angry because we were closed. I spoke to her that morning because we spoke on the phone or saw each other almost every day. I figured, “Why wouldn’t you tell me? Why wouldn’t you trust me with this?” I understand now. It’s hard. It’s hard to say the scary thing out loud. It’s hard to fear that maybe something has gone a little sideways with your mind. I can only imagine how terrifying that must have felt for her.
It’s hard to say the scary thing out loud, especially when you fear something may be wrong in your own mind. Share on X
She wasn’t admitting it to me and to others because she didn’t want to admit it to herself. That’s a scary admission to face. In all the work I’ve done since then, I have come to a new truth for myself. Which is how important it is to say the hard thing, how important it is to give waste to those things that we want to bury. That is where the healing is.
That’s the painful part that needs working on and healing. I know many people and many families’ structures have tons of secrets. They stand in the way of people’s healing, progress, and processing. You began this book as a story of your mother’s death. How did that transform to your own healing and rebirth as you process all of this with your feelings and your emotions? Everything.
It’s true. I started writing this about my mom. I thought this was going to be a book about her and her death. I was playing detective and trying to figure out what had happened and to understand her better. In the process, I realized that some of those things that I had been critical of her that she had been withholding. She had secrets that I also did. I wasn’t all that different from her.
There were parts of my life where I was presenting falsely. There were things that I was admitting to myself. There were things that I wasn’t saying out loud either. We were all that different. The story was becoming more about me stepping forward, as you mentioned. Also, shaking some of those secrets off of my own life and taking a hard look at who I was. Not only who my mom was, but who I was as well.
Also, what I’m thinking about is your developmental years career-wise and all. You were so much in the public eye and dealing with all this. It must have been like a washi sheet to keep your secrets and hold certain information from people. It’s like a big leap now to be more authentic and who you are I would think.
Reclaiming the Narrative: From Ghostwriter to Protagonist
As a ghost writer. My job has been to tell other people’s stories and I’ve done that for many years. Part of being a ghost writer is to set your own voice aside and to be the ghost. Be the quiet invisible one so that you can give voice to other people. I realized one of the other themes that emerges in the book is that I had become not only a professional ghost, but a ghost in my personal life.
What served me professionally was not serving me in my personal life. The book was now challenging me to reclaim my voice. I wondered if I had lost it altogether. I wondered where it had gone. That emerges as an important thing for me. In the healing, not only challenging myself to be truthful, but to challenge myself to have a voice at all.
I can understand that. Also, I want to say, giving up the ghost in your book, you explore the idea that suicide just end the life. It leaves behind a constellation of questions and emotions. There are other questions and conversations that you evoke through the book. Do you want to tell us about that? There are a lot of people reading who may be struggling with these kinds of issues and your book can help them.
I had never experienced grief. I had heartache, loss, disappointment, sadness, and layers of like that but I had never experienced this life-altering grief. It was just so all-encompassing. I felt it in my body. I saw it everywhere. I discovered everything. The suicide aspect complicated it. The grief counselor I started working with pretty soon after I lost her explained how the haunting is in the how with suicide. Many questions are left behind, as I mentioned the details of when, why, what did I do and how this person has left the earth. Those questions took center stage of my grief for many months.
Did you have that feeling of wanting to say to her, “Why did you do this to me? Why did you leave all this open and stuff? I thought you loved me right there.”
There was a lot of personalizing it. There were a lot of, why did you do this to me? Why would you do this? How could you do this? Those questions can become this endless loop that takes the center stage of grief. It wasn’t until many months later when I started working through some of those questions. I wasn’t answering them necessarily, but I was a little more clear at least in a way that made sense to me. I was able to answer some of them. Once I was able to push past the how, I got to a cleaner grief, which was just in missing her. They’re different. Those are different kinds of grief. Suicide complicates grief in that way.
Suicide complicates grief in profound ways. Share on X
What would you like to tell everyone about the book? What can they get from the book aside from it touches on suicide, grief and all these things? Is there something special you would like to tell everyone about your book?
It’s not all doom and gloom. On its face, it’s a difficult subject. I started writing it because I was experiencing deep loss and a disruption in my life like none other, a shattering. There’s a lot of humor in it as well. I have two sisters and they play a prominent role in the book. Part of how we handled some of these difficult moments was with dark humor. I’d like readers to know that there is respite in there also.
I write a lot about my son. My relationship with my son who is eight at the time. We had some quite lovely, sweet moments because of this tragedy that brought us closer together. Rabbi B, who goes by B, my grief coach in the book. He has some of the best lines. He’s a throughline throughout because he was my hand in the dark and such a wise, solid, steady hand for me. There’s a lot there for readers to attach to depending on how they come to the book.
That’s beautiful. I hope and I trust they will. Many of them will. That was very wise to get a therapist right away. I did that too when I had my loss. I want to ask you a little bit about this clean grief as opposed to the muddy degree. It sounds like, as you wrote the book, you started healing just from the experience of writing the book and getting a lot of these feelings and concerns. Mitigated, healed or whatever. Do you want to talk about that? That then leads you into, you start having dreams and you’re connecting with your mother. What was that process like?
Somatics of Sorrow: Writing as a Physical Release for Grief
For me, it was an actual thing to do to write. It’s because I’m a professional writer and I write every day. I didn’t realize that the writing process would physically move grief out of my body. It did. Grief is an energy and it coils around our nervous system. It lives in our body. It will wreak havoc in there. It wants somewhere to go.
Writing for me was a channel for grief. As I would write certain scenes or certain conversations, the ones that had been banging around in my head the most, the ones that didn’t seem to want to go anywhere except for in a loop. As I wrote them down and translated them onto the page, I did start to feel a physical lift. Not entirely and not all at once but incrementally and subtly. I did feel a release of some of that grief. I thought, “This is amazing. I’m going to keep doing this.”
Even though it was hard, it was hard to write about this. It was harder not to, though because it wasn’t going to go anywhere. I have been telling people, you don’t have to write your grief out. Find some active channel for it. Whether that’s running a marathon or painting or just being in conversation with other people. It could be anything but grief wants your attention. It wants somewhere to go.
Feel free, Sam, to tell me you don’t agree with me, but what I liken to is you’ve had this person swimming through your body all these years. This person is a part of your structure and part of your life. All of a sudden, they’re gone. I liken grief in some way to withdrawal. Your body is calling out for this person and they’re no longer accessible to you. That’s one of the reasons we feel it so much in different ways in our bodies.
There’s a bond. There’s a physical bond that has been broken. For me, with a mother, there’s that invisible umbilical cord you have throughout your life. She never was on this earth a day that I was alive. For that person to not be there from one minute to the next was very jarring. It was very difficult for me to reconcile on a mental level. Physically, I wanted my mom.
You want your mommy back. “Give me my hug.” How did this turn into connecting with her through dreams? How do you find out about automatic writing? I’m sure a lot of our readers are interested in that because they’ve lost people. That’s the way you discovered how to communicate with her. Tell us all about that.
The book takes a turn in the second part and I wrote as things were happening. This is not a literary device. This is what happened. What happened is that I started having dreams about my mom.
How long has she been on the other side?
Within a couple months. Now, I am someone who dreams every night. I dream wildly and I often remember them. For her to enter my dreams didn’t feel crazy to me. The first one in which I write about was so vivid and so clear. She comes floating in. She’s got this amazing, celestial swirl of hair. She has like a wink of a smile and she says, “Do you like my hair?” She then disappeared. Now, anyone that knows my mom knows that her hair was a constant preoccupation. Whether she should get a cut or colored or a new style or the latest gel or mousse, or whatever. The thing was, we were always talking about my mom’s hair.
For her to have solved her hair problem on the other side would have been very important information that she would want to transmit to me. It stuck out. The next morning, I kept thinking about it. I’m like, “What is that? Was that you?” It felt like her. I said out loud to myself to her, “If that was real, then come back. Do it again.”
Bridging the Great Divide: Dreams and Automatic Writing
I intentionally invited her back into my dreams. She does return, and I do what she had taught me to do my whole life. Which is, if you hear something interesting or you haven’t inspired thought, write it down. I started writing down the dreams and then eventually, I start inviting her to dialogue with me on the page through automatic writing or intentional writing. The process I used was pretty similar to what I do with clients in ghost writing. As I mentioned earlier, I put my own voice over here on the shelf and listen to them.
Only come through to you as a thought?
A thought or a feeling or I intuit how they would respond. Now, I learned about automatic writing with my work with Rebecca Rosen, who is a Medium and was the first ghost writing project I had.
She’s out of Atlanta, isn’t she?
She’s out of Denver. Her first book was Spirited. We’ve since collaborated on four books. I have gone from a healthy skeptic to a believer in mediumship and the ability to at least invite our loved ones to have conversation with us. Although when it came to me and my mom, I thought, “This seems a little out there.” I was having these dreams and as I mentioned, I had a lot of questions.
She was no longer physically here to answer them but I thought, “You’re not off the hook. We still have things to talk about, so let’s do that.” My mom always had a lot of things to say. I figured, why not give her a voice? Why not let her have a voice about her own death? We start dialoguing back and forth. Those take up a big portion of the second part of the book.
That’s amazing, though. That’s so interesting. Did she say anything to you that was particularly life-changing or healing, like as to why it happened or what happened or comments about things?
I came to an understanding through these conversations. To be honest, when I started doing it, I thought, “People might think I’m nuts.” There might be people who say, “How dare you write in your dead mother’s voice? How dare you speak for her?” I struggled with that a little bit, but eventually came to what is transpiring here feels true to me. It is helping me move forward. I am going to do it and I will let readers come to their own conclusions. I got to a point where a lot of the questions I had felt answered. I came to an understanding that seemed true. I was able to move from a lot of anger, those feelings of abandonment and betrayal into compassion for her. Also, forgiveness of myself for what I might have missed for not saving her.
Maybe you weren’t perfect.
I’m not perfect.
None of us are. We all have to learn to forgive ourselves. I want to be mindful because I can relate to this experience. You talked about your son, how you struggled to know the right time to tell him and what you were going to tell him. That’s so important. Can you share that with us? Things happen all the time and people don’t know how to broach it with their kids and all that. Enlighten us.
Breaking the Cycle: Radical Honesty in Parenting After Loss
My son was eight at the time and had a very close relationship with his grandmother. He called her Motty. He had seen her a couple days before and she was perfectly healthy. She was not giving any indication that he was not going to see her again the following week. He knew something had gone wrong.
He knew something had gone wrong before the event or after the event?
After. He had a sense that we had lost track of her. Knowing him, I had the sense that he was going to ask a lot of questions and demand answers. Now, every kid is different and we need to take into account the temperaments of our kids. His cousins approached it differently. They didn’t want to know. I was right. He wanted to know. He wanted details.
Did they literally not want to know about what happened?
Not initially. Not in the same way that my son did, and I can’t speak to that. I know my son wanted to know what happened. I had the forethought that if I am not honest with him appropriately for his age. I didn’t tell him everything. He’s going to know it and he’s not going to trust me. We are going to need to trust each other in the next few months and years ahead. I was a single mom at the time going through a divorce. It was three weeks before the pandemic lockdown.
There was nothing on your plate.
Only a few things. We were thrown into this chaos of the tragedy. At the same time, the world was going through its own trauma and had a lot of time to gather. I made the decision early on that I am going to answer every question he has. I am going to say nothing is off the table. We don’t keep secrets in this house. It bonded us. He did ask a lot of questions as he should. He lost someone also.
He loved her. He was close to her.
A lot of times, we have the best intentions. We don’t want to scare our kids. We don’t want to hurt them. We don’t want to introduce things. I didn’t want to introduce suicide to my son. He never even heard that word before. How do you even understand a concept that someone can choose to end their life? It doesn’t make sense. I resented her that I had to introduce this to him. Not just as a concept but this is now part of our family’s story. The alternative to hide it, what would have just caused more damage.
I agree with you. I would imagine you were working with your therapist and he probably advised you had a handle it with your son.
I wasn’t working with him yet. This was a decision with my sister and I, who has kids. The day we found out that this happened, my son was with his dad. I knew that the next day I was going to have to tell him, not tell him or know what to tell him. We decided together that night that we were going to tell the kids. We came up with script of what we would say. The original script was a lot more ambiguous than what I ended up saying to my son because he wasn’t going to be satisfied with a generalized explanation.
Which fits into the idea that they each have their own personality and needs. You have to speak to that.
It’s not a one-size-fits-all at all. Knowing your child. Honor what you think they need.
Grief is not one-size-fits-all. Know your child and honor what they need. Share on X
Since you were working with a therapist and challenged you to consider what it means to be your own light source. You have to being the moon to your mother’s sun. To me, this is wonderful illustration of the positive things that can come out from working with a therapist. They get you to see things that are important. You wouldn’t have necessarily have thought about that on your own. Where did you come to with that advice as you step into your own sunlight?
The Moon and the Sun: Transitioning into Your Own Light
He did an amazing job of putting up a mirror and showing me things that I wasn’t seeing but had been there. My mom, as I mentioned, was such a force. She was a light. She’s the person people would say, “You should light up a room when she walked in.” In studying and exploring our relationship through writing, I came to understand that I had always played the moon to her sun.
I love that, by the way.
I always orbited around her and I was the constant but I was in the shadows. She took center stage, and I was in the background. I did this willingly when I realized this. He was the one to put words to it. I realized that I did do that. It felt good to bask in her sunlight. I’m more introverted and she was more extroverted. We made this agreement silently over time through a lifetime together. He then challenges me to become my own light source.
I remember thinking, “How am I supposed to do that?” I know how to be a moon. I can’t be a sun. What I’ve come to understand is we all are our own light sources. We’re all light. How we shine and how we show up is different. She was bright and blazing. I’m not dim, but I have my own version of it. I am continuing to identify how best to illuminate.
We are all our own light sources. We all shine differently. Share on X
You’re doing a good job.
Thank you.
You’re shining for us. Before I get into another question, since we’re talking about your book. Do you have an offer for our readers? Do you want to tell everyone about that?
I’d be happy to send out five signed copies of my book for the first five people to follow me on Instagram. I’m @SamanthaRose_Writer. You can DM me, Grief and Rebirth and I’ll send you a copy of the book.
Thank you so much. I want to know since you made a comment about this. Does healing mean pain disappears? When you heal, what has the healing meant for you? Why would you say it’s important for everyone to heal or people to do the work?Which is not easy.
It’s not easy. There’s a lot of reasons why to avoid it because it’s painful. What I would say about that is there’s no end date to grieving. At least I have not come upon one. It’s been a few years since my mom passed. I miss her every day still, but it’s not as cute. It’s softer. It’s what happens but it’s there. I have decided that I don’t want it to ever just disappear.
It’s like the pain that recedes and hits you out of the blue because there’ll still be days where something will trigger me in a way I did not see coming. It recedes but it reminds me how much she meant. The relationship was deep, real, and meaningful. The grief I’m feeling is a byproduct of how much I loved her. I don’t want to ever not feel that. It takes a while to get there.
When you get there, which I’ve experienced also, for me, is another way to honor the person who’s now on the other side. They are still there. They would want for you to find happiness and move on but you’re still honoring them. Only because they’re not physically here, it doesn’t mean they’re not with you.
In California, it’s early Spring. It’s an explosion of color. I went on a walk around the neighborhood and there’s lilacs blooming. I started to well up. I said, “Hi, Mom.” I see her in all of it. I see her everywhere. It hurts because I wish she was here walking next to me but she is. She’s just in a different form. I believe that truly. We honor them by speaking their name a loud and by talking about memories.
They hear us.
Through a ritual tradition. This is how we keep them present. They can still be present.
You also have a beautiful mantra that I love. Your mantra is, “Open the door. See what comes through.” I’d like to ask you. How has does this guide you toward joy? What does joy like for you now?
I’m glad that you like that. “Open the door.” I got to keep reminding myself to do that, as a writer who works alone and a single mom. It’s easy to stay behind the door. The best thing that’s come out of this is writing the book was a way to open the door to remind myself that there’s a world out there. My mom loved life.
This book has a lot to do with how she died. The truth is, she loved life. She was curious. She loved its complexity and its color. She was so engaged and curious. I honor her by living and I honor myself by living. I have become very aware of my own mortality. I wish I didn’t think about it as much as I do, but I am in my 50s now.
It’s front and center. As cliché as it sounds, we’re not going to be around here forever. I’m aware of it. I’m aware that she’s not. For me to seize the moment, whatever that looks like. That is joy. Are all moments joyful? Not at all. The awareness that we can open the door and step out. I look for surprise. I’m delighted by when life in the world surprises me. That’s where I find joy.
Joy often comes from staying open to surprise and allowing life to move you unexpectedly. Share on X
It’s because you’re still open to the possibility. You opened the door to possibility. I also have something that I was told by a therapist, “Open the door and walk through it. If you don’t like what’s going on behind that particular door, it’s not an ending. There’s another door. Walk back out and find your other door.”
Which made me and my situation a lot braver as I was leaving the protective canopy I’ve been living under. I completely understand. The other thing I want to say, would you agree with this, Sam? Have parts of your mom now come into you where you have more of her in a way with you when you were enjoying her as she was in your life in the physical?
Reflections in the Mirror: Embracing the Mother-Daughter Bond
We have a lot of similarities. We look a lot alike. As I get older, I look more and more like her. When she was alive, I knew that we were similar. I talked about how she was more extroverted and introverted, but there are a lot of things we did share. The same style and sense of humor. We’re both writers. We got each other.
After she died, I wanted to do that thing almost like you do when you’re a teenager. Where you want to push your parent away, like, “I’m nothing like you. I’m not going to follow in your footsteps. I’m going to be the opposite. You were closed down. I’m going to be open.” I did this polarity thing with her. Now, I’m realizing we’ve come back around where I see a lot of her in myself but I see myself more than I ever saw myself when she was alive.
That’s beautiful. I can relate just for me. My husband had an amazing sense of humor and I find that, humbly stated, I’ve gotten funnier in life. I know that some of that is coming from him. Sam, in closing, I want to share this quote from your book, Giving Up the Ghost with our audience because it touched me.
The quote is, “The beating pulse of loss doesn’t go away. It fades. It goes quiet at times, but it doesn’t stop. The missing of someone continues. The missing is hard and long. A daily reminder, there are some sorrows we have to live with. The fear is not gone either. It’s a regular visitor that tries to block the door. You have to decide if you will move forward anyway.”
Thank you.
You’re welcome. It’s so true. Sam, I want to thank you for my heart for sharing your extraordinary story and your wisdom with us and illuminating how grief can open the path to rebirth. I wish you abundant blessings always.
Thank you, Irene.
You’re welcome. As I like to say, to be continued. Bye for now.
Guest’s Links:
- Connect with Samantha Rose on LinkedIn
- Connect with Samantha Rose on Instagram
- Connect with Samantha Rose on Facebook
- Giving Up the Ghost: A Daughter’s Memoir
- Yellow Sky Media
- Rebecca Rosen
- Spirited
About Samantha Rose
New York Times bestselling ghostwriter Samantha Rose steps out of the shadows to unravel the mystery surrounding her mother’s suicide. What begins as a solitary journey through grief takes an unexpected turn when her mother returns from the darkness beyond, determined to reconcile her irreversible choice.
Raw, deeply revealing, and threaded with resilient humor, Giving Up the Ghost explores mental health, the enduring bond between mothers and daughters, and how, in the aftermath of profound loss, we can release our inner ghosts and write a new story for ourselves.
