52 pages • 1 hour read
Ghosts
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Symbols & Motifs
Ghosts
Traditionally, people view ghosts as spirits of the dead who linger either to resolve unfinished business or to haunt and persecute those who harmed them.
However, Ghosts employs the idea of spectral visitations not as spooky phantasms but instead as metaphorical representations of unresolved pasts, lingering emotions, and unfulfilled desires. The first mention of ghosts comes when Lola explains to Nina that she has been “ghosted” by a boyfriend. Lola says:
It is thought to have come from the idea that you are haunted by someone who vanishes, you don’t get any closure. Others have said it derives from the three gray dots that appear and then disappear when someone is writing you an iMessage and then doesn’t send it. Because it looks ghostly (100).
In the context of modern dating, the term refers to when a person ceases all communication with a significant other without providing any explanation, leaving the other person confused, abandoned, and unable to get closure. Nina later experiences this phenomenon when Max disappears, leading her to wonder if he was just a figment of her imagination or a ghostly visitation.
Even before Max vanishes, the “ghosts” of his past relationships prevent Nina from being fully present with him when they are intimate. Later, when Max returns, he explains that people bring ghosts into the bedroom with them and asks her, “[W]hat ghosts are you bringing to the orgy?” (283). Nina’s failed relationship with Joe is one such ghost, but she’s also haunted by Max’s prior abandonment. Throughout the novel, ghosts symbolize Nina’s unresolved past, lingering memories, and lack of closure in her relationships. However, ghosts also symbolize the uncertainty of the future. Bill’s dementia is changing his personality and Nina longs to protect his memories and the image of the father she knows and loves. Like Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, Nina sees what lies ahead, and it frightens her, but unlike Scrooge, she is powerless to change the trajectory of her father’s cognitive decline. Nina’s ghosts can’t be exorcised or banished; instead she must learn to live them, neither fearing the future nor dwelling on the past, but living fully in the present.
Linx
Linx, a clever play on the word “link,” is the fictional dating app Nina and Lola use, and a prominent motif in the novel. Linx becomes Nina’s portal into the online dating world and introduces her to the challenges of creating and maintaining an online persona to find a partner. At first, Nina is enthralled by the prospect of scrolling through endless possible mates, but she soon finds that the act leaves her feeling empty and hopeless because the profiles don’t represent real people; they are either avatars of wish fulfillment or attempts to game the system. Lola goes so far as to compare the app to a video game in which men attempt to “level up” or win the game by matching with and dating women, only to drop them and move on to the next level. Nina mourns the loss of traditional relationship moments like the meet cute, saying, “Who meets in a park these days?” (60). Yet, despite their aversion to online dating, both Nina and Lola are drawn to the app repeatedly in an unhealthy cycle of obsession and regret. After heartbreak, they delete the app and resolve to quit the dating matrix, only to find themselves reinstalling the app on a lonely night. They also use the app to track the whereabouts of the men they are dating.
The novel’s portrayal of Linx underscores the way technology has redefined social interactions and highlights the negative aspects of modern dating culture. As Nina realizes, the profiles are highly curated—and not always truthful—representations. Additionally, hiding behind a screen allows Max and Jethro to avoid difficult conversations and shirk personal responsibility, which causes both Nina and Lola acute distress. Though Nina initially feels empowered by using Linx, she ultimately can’t buy into online dating’s reimagining of intimacy—as Lola declares, “I can’t buy love. I can’t get it on an app” (220). Despite this, the novel ends on an ambivalent note, with Lola rejoining the app and Nina toying with the idea. Ghosts examines how society continues to grapple with the implications of social platforms and their profound influence on the ways people connect, form attachments, and understand love in the modern world.
Memory
For Nina, memory is inextricably tied to identity. Nina worries that as Bill loses his memories, a part of her will be lost as well. Her trips to Albyn Square represent her attempt to return to the innocence of childhood, when her father was healthy and their family was happy. However, each time she visits her recollections are more painful than comforting as she considers all she has lost. Nina often engages in selective memory, choosing to remember pleasant moments while deliberately forgetting less pleasant ones. For example, after her first date with Max, Nina commits only scattered details of his personality to memory and uses those fractured remembrances to construct a fantasy image of him: “Not only were these four memories just enough to satiate my daydreams, working out exactly why my memory had clung on to specific vignettes also fascinated me” (64). Through memory, Nina constructs a version of Max that satisfies her longings, but later Nina realizes that her memories tricked her, and she missed early warning signs that he wasn’t ready to be in a relationship.
Nostalgia becomes a lens through which she views her past with a sense of longing and sentimentality, but it also colors her view of the present and future. Each time she visits with her father, she becomes obsessed with preserving his memories: “So much of the love you feel for a person is dependent on the vast archive of shared memories you can access just by seeing their face or hearing their voice” (255). Bill’s dementia teaches Nina that she must reformulate her definition of memory. She explains to Katherine, “So much is how we perceive someone and the memories we have of them, rather than the facts of who they are. Maybe instead of saying I love you we should say I imagine you” (309). As Nina’s pain deepens, she becomes too focused on returning to the peace of her youth to accept her present and look hopefully toward the future. However, Bill’s accidental fall precipitates an epiphany when he speaks with her afterward. Although he thinks he is talking to her teenage self, his advice is just as cogent. Nina realizes that dementia may have the power to rearrange Bill’s memories, but it can’t erase his soul. She commits to living more fully in the present and savoring each moment they have together. The final scene of the novel situates Nina in Albyn Square, a place that once pained her but is now the site of a new memory, her 33rd birthday celebration. Nina describes the mulberry tree not as she remembers it from her childhood but as an integral part of her current identity, symbolizing how far she has come in making peace with the past.
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