About My Mother’s Ghost

“We got off to a bad start that summer, the summer of my fourteenth year. Even now, remembering what happened is like watching a continuous film strip that turns back upon itself and is always the same, always curiously comforting in its familiarity, except for its last catastrophic scene, which changes everything. ” —Fergus Bordewich, from My Mother’s Ghost

          Like any child facing the tragic loss of a parent, Fergus Bordewich spent several decades of his life attempting to come to grips with the death of his mother. Bordewich was the only witness to the accident that took her life—while riding a runaway horse on a rainy morning, his mother jumped off and was seemingly caught under the hooves of his own. As she lay in a gathering pool of blood, Bordewich thought to himself—I’ve killed my mother.
          So begins My Mother’s Ghost, Bordewich’s powerful memoir of the woman he cherished, and whose ghost would haunt him forever after. Following the tragedy, Bordewich’s life slowly spun out of control. Fighting depression, alcoholism, and his father’s retreat into silence and drink, Bordewich became a nomad. By the time he finished college, his one life-line was writing. At twenty-four, he was writing stories for the New York Times, spending time in Greece, Turkey, India, anywhere he could find money to visit. But however far he ran, Bordewich always found himself in the shadow of his mother. By the age of twenty-seven, he was close to suicide.

          “No longer is LaVerne Madigan a half-stranger excavated from news archives and yellowing photos; she is my mother. She is at the center of everything, . . . inseparable from our street, from the ambience of rooms, from the feelings of certain hours of the day, and thus from time itself. She is infused like a vapor into everything I know. She is the bedrock, the Precambrian, upon which everything rests.” —Fergus Bordewich

          Bordewich’s mother, LaVerne Madigan, was a woman ahead of her time. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate at NYU in 1934, she was a prolific poet and writer, an expert in the deciphering of ancient manuscripts that even now are on display in the Morgan Library in New York City, as well as a political radical. In 1951 LaVerne began her career with the Association of American Indian Affairs, working with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Oliver LaFarge as an advocate of Indian rights. In 1955, she became the Executive Director, travelling to South Dakota, Nebraska, Alaska, and other parts of the country, often with Fergus in tow, to help establish social and political programs on behalf of Native American tribes.
          In the course of My Mother’s Ghost, Fergus Bordewich, now a father himself, decided to use his investigative skills as a journalist to find out what his flesh and blood mother, as opposed to his memories of her, was really like. Drawing upon poetry, interviews, newspaper articles, and personal memories, Bordewich painfully reconstructed the woman who has not left his mind for one day since 1962. My Mother’s Ghost is an emotionally wrenching story that pierces the heart, and is ultimately a triumphant affirmation of the healing power of love. Reading My Mother’s Ghost is like opening a Pandora’s box of emotions: love, obsession, guilt, pleasure, and the seduction of memory are all explored.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Underground Railroad HomeTimeline: the story of the underground  |  excerpts and reviews from Bound for Canaan | The Underground Railroad, Myth & reality | Other books by Fergus Bordewich
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