The Ghost Marriage by Kirsten Mickelwait

Release: June 1, 2021
Format: Paperback
Publisher: She Writes Press
Source: Suzy approved Book Tours
Find it at: Goodreads, Amazon, Kindle, B&N, Kobo

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 become someone quite different from the man Kirsten first met. Unemployed and addicted to opioids, he uses money and their two children to emotionally blackmail her. The couple separates but, just after their divorce is finalized, Steve is diagnosed with colon cancer and dies within the year, leaving Kirsten with $1.5 million in debts from properties that are no longer hers. It’s only then that she finally understands: The man she married was a needy, addictive person wrapped in a shiny package.

As she fights toward recovery, Kirsten begins to receive communications from Steve in the afterlife—leading 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. This is a book about life after divorce and life after death. It’s a story of how forgiveness is the best revenge.

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. The Ghost Marriage is Kirsten’s first memoir. The book tells her story of spiritual connection and surviving divorce after 50.

You can learn more about her and her new memoir, The Ghost Marriage, at www.kirstenmickelwait.com.

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The Ghost Marriage Review:

What do you do when you feel you have the perfect marriage, but things don’t turn out the way you had hoped? I thought “The Ghost Marriage” was a gripping memoir about how the author’s life changes after marriage.

The main reason why I enjoyed this story was that you see the author grow as a person between the beginning and the end. Your feelings for the author and Steve change throughout the story, and you realize that they are all human, and life goes on.

The author also writes the emotions in detail. I couldn’t put the book down when the author gets raw with her feelings and describes the paranoia she felt when she thought Stephen tapped her phone and was monitoring her and when she has to adapt to the uncertainty of what will happen.

However, the book is not all gloom and doom about divorce. The author also adds some positive moments, like meeting Mike and feeling a sense of optimism. Similarly, I also liked the author’s relationship with Gregory and even Eddie, for that matter. The author writes the characters so personally that you immediately root for them. After reading some of the awful things Steve had done just to beat her in court, I felt terrible for her. I also liked the plot surrounding the Riordan foundation and how it is not as perfect as it appears.

Perhaps the only thing I would have liked to read more was the children’s perception and adaption to the divorce. It would have been interesting to see how Bronte and Amory adapted to the changes.

Overall, “The Ghost Marriage” is a fascinating memoir that invested me in characters personally.