I know lots of things now that I'm dead. Peter from Apartment Two has a spastic bladder. My former boss Morgan keeps her toenails in a gold jewellery box. My brother and his wife are trying for a baby. I always excuse myself before things get too heated.
I don't know much about my mother yet. I am waiting for grief to catch her, but she mostly seems ashamed-of her body, of what it made.
A mother cuts her daughter's hair because her own hair starts falling out. A woman leaves her boyfriend because he reminds her of a corpse. A woman undergoes brain surgery to try and live more comfortably in higher temperatures. A widow attempts to physically transform into her husband so that she does not have to grieve.
The characters that populate She is Haunted search for recognition and connection, and, more than anything else, small moments of empathy - offering piercing insights into transnational Asian identity and intergenerational trauma and grief, the dynamics of mother-daughter relationships, the inexplicable oddities of female friendship, and the love of a good dog.
Paige Clark has crafted an exquisite, moving and sophisticated debut work of fiction with wit, humour and a literary voice as contemporary as it is unique.
'The stories in She is Haunted grapple with a mix of timeless human problems and uniquely contemporary dilemmas: grief, illness, identity and heartbreak, but also who gets custody of the dog after a break-up, bureaucratic responses to deeply personal relationship issue and the politics of food. Paige Clark writes with wit, warmth and nuance using precise, playful language giving us a collection full of (sometimes embarrassingly) relatable characters, sneaky insights and surprising bursts of joy.' Emily Maguire, author of Love Objects and An Isolated Incident
