Chasing Ghosts

Louise DeSalvo started the MFA in Memoir Program at Hunter College where she held the Jenny Hunter Endowed Chair for Literature and Creative Writing until her retirement in 2017. She is the author of several books including Virginia Woolf, Vertigo, and The Art of Slow Writing.

The "ghosts" [DeSalvo] chases are the ghosts that have been with her all along, shaping her childhood interest in history, and in war stories, and, eventually, in memoir-writing, which, she shows, can provide us with a new an illuminating version of the past

—Joshua Fausty:
Louise DeSalvo extends a tradition that includes Montaigne and Emerson and Woolf. She writes to discover something she doesn’t know when she starts. Her work becomes: it is transformative—art for the sake of life. She is one of the most accomplished memoir writers of our time. Chasing Ghosts is powerfully executed.

—Philip Klay:
Both a beautifully detailed examination of wartime life and a searingly honest depiction of a fraught father-daughter relationship, Louise DeSalvo's Chasing Ghosts is a unique and valuable contribution to the literature of World War II.

—Alexandra Styron:
“A man and his family, inexorably defined by war, rise vividly from the pages of this excellent memoir. Louise DeSalvo remembers her soldier father in a manner both unsparing and elegiac. She roots around at the confounding heart of the filial bond and pulls up something admirably strong, original, and true.”