Books like Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

Despite the fact that I spend a lot of my free time reading, I'm not the sort of person who goes around saying books have 'changed my life'. I struggle to see how even the most brilliant and memorable books I've read have actually changed me. But Ghosts of My Life might truly deserve that epithet. It is essentially a collection of essays about music, TV, film and novels, but it feels like something much bigger and more significant is shifting beneath its skin. This book has introduced me to entirely new ways of looking at and thinking about pop culture. It's a reading of the world through the lens of pop culture.The interview with electronic musician Burial is extraordinary. If it'd been part of a novel I'd have found it unrealistic; I'd have thought no real interview could ever be that insightful, that revealing. Partway through the book I found myself struck by the destabilising thought that perhaps it was a novel, and the apparently non-fictitious nature of the book was somehow a very elaborate ruse. It is non-fiction, but the fact that I even entertained that thought shows how powerful it is as a narrative. The essays hang together remarkably well, given the disparity of their subjects.The other day, after watching a really good film, I was thinking about this feeling I get when I'm watching or reading something I am beginning to realise I love (usually after going into it with low/vague expectations). It's a feeling of gradual escalating elation, a slow build of euphoria, joy gathering speed. Ghosts of My Life made me feel that. It made me feel like neglected synapses were suddenly ablaze. ---Some lines and passages I noted down:Those who can't remember the past are condemned to have it resold to them forever.Haunting... can be construed as a failed mourning. It is about refusing to give up the ghost or – and this can sometimes amount to the same thing – the refusal of the ghost to give up on us.The family is a haunted structure, an Overlook Hotel full of presentiments and uncanny repetitions, something that speaks ahead of us, instead of us...What we have lost, it can often seem, is the very possibility of loss.Lots of good stuff in the essay about Joy Division:Because Joy Division's bleakness was without any specific cause, they crossed the line from the blue of sadness into the black of depression, passing into the 'desert and wastelands' where nothing brings either joy or sorrow. Zero affect. (These lines, both content and rhythm, made me realise how much Ghosts of My Life reminded me of Joel Lane's writing.)... the ultimate horror, the life-Will paradoxically assuming all the loathsome properties of the undead (whatever you do, you can't extinguish it, it keeps coming back).What did they [Joy Division] see there? Only what all depressives, all mystics, always see: the obscene undead twitching of the Will as it seeks to maintain the illusion that this object, the one it is fixated upon NOW, this one, will satisfy it...[Joy Division] knew that satiation wasn't succeeded by tristesse, it was itself, immediately, tristesse. Satiation is the point at which you must face the existential revelation that you didn't really want what you seemed so desparate to have, that your most urgent desires are only a filthy vitalist trick to keep the show on the road.TinyLetter | Twitter | Instagram | Tumblr