The Ghosts Who Travel with Me: A Literary Pilgrimage Through Brautigan's America

Published in 1967, Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan was hugely popular. It's an episodic, zany, picaresque novella that begins in San Francisco and ends in rural Idaho. Allison Green (Half-Moon Scar) was four when it came out. Just as Brautigan's book celebrated a more pastoral America in retrospect, Green's delightfully whimsical memoir, The Ghosts Who Travel with Me, is an appealing look back to a time she wishes she had participated in. She travels with her partner, Arline, from Seattle to Boise, then up into the Sawtooth Mountains in pursuit of the ghosts of Brautigan and his America.

Structurally, her book mirrors Brautigan's. She, too, employs short, episodic chapters on a variety of topics: her parents' record collection, hamburger frying, her inner trout. Brautigan was the first lyrical writer she ever read, the "first writer more interested in sentences and words than story. I responded by shrugging into the pajamas of his style." Her memoir goes back and forth, to her youth and the experiences that were important to her when she was growing up, to her and Arline's current road-trip adventures, including fretting about possible encounters with the Aryan Nation members camped out in North Idaho."

Retracing Brautigan's route, they seek out the lakes and rivers he fished in. When Green finally finds an empty mountain campsite Brautigan used 47 years ago, she feels like a "pilgrim to an abandoned religious site." Her entertaining memoir is heartfelt, filled with an intimate and welcoming charm. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

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