The Ghost Marriage: A Memoir

by Kirsten Mickelwait

Overview

At thirty-one, Kirsten has just returned to San Francisco from a bohemian year in Rome, ready to pursue a serious career as a writer and eventually, she hopes, marriage and family. When she meets Steve Beckwith, a handsome and successful attorney, she begins to see that future materialize more quickly than she’d dared to expect.

Twenty-two years later, Steve has turned into someone quite different. Unemployed and addicted to opioids, he uses money and their two children to emotionally blackmail Kirsten. What’s more, he’s been having an affair with their real estate agent, who is also her close friend. So she divorces him—but after their divorce is finalized, Steve is diagnosed with colon cancer and dies within a year, leaving Kirsten with $1.5 million in debts she knew nothing about. It’s then that she finally understands: The man she’d married was a needy, addictive person who came wrapped in a shiny package.

As she fights toward recovery, Kirsten begins to receive communications from Steve in the afterlife—which lead her on an unexpected path to forgiveness. The Ghost Marriage is her story of discovery—that life isn’t limited to the tangible reality we experience on this earth, and that our worst adversaries can become our greatest teachers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781647420307
Publisher:	She Writes Press
Publication date:	06/01/2021
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Kirsten Mickelwait is a professional copywriter and editor by day and a writer of fiction and creative nonfiction by night. She’s an alumna of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the Paris Writers’ Conference, and the San Francisco Writers’ Conference. Her short story, “Parting with Nina,” won first prize in The Ledge’s 2004 Fiction Awards Competition. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she’s at work on a new novel.

Table of Contents

Part I

Prologue 1

Is This Hollywood? 3

A Charmed Life 17

Adaptation 22

My Problem Child 35

Fault Line 47

A Basket of Bells 55

Part II

Football Players 61

Au Revoir, Hooverville 71

Under House Arrest 83

Meshugaas 94

The Bearded Woman 101

Road Kill Café 113

Gimme Shelter 125

Broken Bones 133

Kangaroo Court 141

The Nuremberg Defense 155

A Diploma of Virtue 160

All the Bells and Whistles 165

How the Light Gets In 172

Fugue State 179

Pyramid Scheme 189

Part III

Requiem and Raw Sewage 205

Indemnification 219

A Shakespearean Tragedy 235

The Whole World in His Hands 251

Part IV

Earth Is Forgiveness School 265

All the Things He Didn't Do 276

These Men Don't Like You 283

O Magnum Mysterium 289

Despair Is a Spiritual State 298

A Meatball at the Mouth of a Cave 305

Lifting the Veil 312

Disembarkation 318

Editorial Reviews

A skillfully written, thought-provoking account that positively reconsiders an antagonist as an important teacher.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“A unique kind of paranormal and metaphysical memoir . . . an inherently fascinating and emotionally involving read from cover to cover.”
—Midwest Book Review

“What if you accidentally married your worst enemy? With unflinching honesty and hard-earned grace, Kirsten Mickelwait peels the shiny façade off her catastrophic marriage to reveal how she not only survived the lies, betrayals, and lawsuits, but also found her way to compassion. If you don’t think on your ex fondly, The Ghost Marriage will teach you why you should.”
—Meredith May, author of The Honey Bus and Loving Edie

“The Ghost Marriage is an absorbing tale about what happens when you marry Prince Charming and the expected ‘Happily Ever After’ erodes into a kind of ‘Cursed Ever After.’ It’s a story of survival, of adjusted ambition, of how to be quick on your feet when your daily foundation crumbles in midlife.”
—Julia Scheeres, author of Jesusland and A Thousand Lives

“With The Ghost Marriage, Kirsten Mickelwait—in bracing, unsentimental prose— brings us in close to the disturbing history of her troubled marriage. It’s abundantly satisfying to watch her move through each crisis toward new compassion—for herself, but also for her deceased ex-husband.”
—Angela Pneuman, author of Lay It on My Heart and Home Remedies

“By turns hilarious, lyrical, suspenseful, and touching, Kirsten Mickelwait’s memoir pulls us into the whirlpool of her unique marriage—then spits us out into the dazzling light of what that marriage came to mean. Supremely well written, and with a captivating honesty.”
—Veronica Chater, author of Waiting for the Apocalypse

From the Publisher

2021-03-23
A divorced woman’s perceptions of her controlling ex-husband shift radically when she establishes a new bond with him following his death in this debut memoir.

In 1985, Mickelwait returned to California after working as a tour guide in Rome. Setting up as a freelance marketing writer, she found her social life waning before meeting her future husband, an attorney named Steve, at a friend’s wedding. Described by others as looking like “an actor playing a politician,” Steve had plenty of charisma. The author gradually capitulated to his charms and they began dating. The couple went on to marry and have two children before cracks started to show in their relationship. Steve’s personality began to change. He became reliant on drugs for chronic back pain and started growing marijuana and collecting guns and knives. Mickelwait later discovered that Steve was having an affair with Mitzi, their close friend and realtor. Following the couple’s divorce, Steve was diagnosed with colon cancer and later died. The author was left to deal with her ex-husband’s $1.5 million debt because her name was still on the banks’ loan records. Mickelwait’s journey to forgiveness began after seeking spiritual guidance and reconnecting with Steve through a psychic. This is emotionally frank writing in which the author is unafraid to share even her darkest feelings, such as “I thought of all the times I’d wished Steve dead,” after learning of his cancer diagnosis. The memoir’s structure makes for compelling reading, beginning with Steve’s funeral, where, despite sharing 26 years together, Mickelwait admits her “eyes were dry.” The author then backtracks to recall the arc of their relationship, explaining the period of understanding and healing that occurred after his death. Mickelwait is also buoyantly descriptive in these pages. Recalling her “spiritual life coach,” she writes: “Like my own personal Yoda, Arjuna would sit cross-legged in the big striped chair and dispense pithy advice.” Skeptics will struggle to accept the fact that the author communicated with Steve after his death, and cynical readers may find her psychic’s conclusion that “everything he did to you, he did for you” difficult to swallow. Still, those who believe in parapsychology will enjoy this smartly conceived book that tracks a major shift in personal perspective made possible through spiritual counseling.

A skillfully written, thought-provoking account that positively reconsiders an antagonist as an important teacher.

Kirkus Reviews