Ghosted

During Parts 1 and 2 of Ghosted, Eddie functions in the narrative as Sarah’s romantic interest. He is characterized in two distinct ways: the evidence from his time with Sarah and her initial impression of him; and the perspective of Sarah and her friends after he has “ghosted” her. Sarah’s first impression is “an old slide of recognition” as her reminds her of her schoolmates:

“[A] big, pleasant loaf of a thing […] He would be capable of putting up shelves, would doubtless know how to surf, and would quite probably drive a clapped-out Golf donated by his pleasant but batty mother (30).

That he is familiar to her uses a convention of the mystery genre: It initially seems to be by virtue of being from the same area but later is revealed to be an uncanny sense of recognition as Alex’s brother.

As he disappears from the narrative, Eddie is increasingly characterized as potentially villainous through Sarah’s friends’ skepticism on him. This initially takes the form of dislike for “ghosting” Sarah, then they see him as potentially more sinister as the situation becomes more suspicious.

In Part 3, when the narrative shifts to Eddie’s voice, he becomes one of the book’s protagonists and a more complex character. Like Sarah, the course of Eddie’s life has been driven by the accident and the loss of Alex. However, in contrast to Sarah, Eddie is particularly rooted in his sense of place, and Sarah views him as being part of the valley. Eddie has a strong perspective on choice, which he discusses early in his relationship with Sarah and reflects on again later in the text: “We are not just victims of our lives. We can choose to be happy. And yet I chose not to be happy, in spite of all I’d said. I turned my back on Sarah Harrington, and this once-in-a-lifetime thing that existed between us, and chose duty” (316). In addition to the central conflict that he experiences surrounding his love for Sarah, he is conflicted because of his sense of obligation to his mother while needing freedom from the burden of caring for her.

One of Sarah’s closest friends, Jo is blunt and vivacious but warm, described for Sarah as “a proper, salt-of-the-earth Cockney” (17). She meets Sarah and Tommy when they are in line for tacos in LA as teenagers, and Sarah asks Tommy if he is gay. Jo intervenes, telling Sarah that she “needs to work on her bedside manner” (129). While skeptical of Sarah’s insistence that something has happened to Eddie, Jo is characterized by her own history of negative romantic experiences with untrustworthy partners: “[E]ach and every time she had let them string her along, because she could never quite give up the hope of being loved” (21). She is therefore a central character in the theme of The Search for a Romantic Soulmate. Sarah describes Jo as having had a difficult childhood and Rudi’s father, Shawn, as using her.

Sarah describes Jo as a wonderful mother who loves Rudi unconditionally. She is fearful of the possibility of Shawn attempting to gain custody. She expresses uncharacteristic vulnerability when declaring her love for Tommy and therefore develops as a complex character.

Tommy is Sarah’s oldest and closest friend from school. Teased in school when bullies suggested that he was gay, Tommy moved to LA with his family at the age of 15, and his absence is devastating to Sarah. In LA, Tommy experiences disordered eating and body image issues and continues to experience a lack of confidence and a desire to prove himself his childhood bullies. He is described as having worked as a personal trainer, before his girlfriend, Zoe, helped him to obtain a role in sports consultancy.

Like Jo, he gains confidence and a sense of family through their relationship. Unlike Tommy’s relationship with Zoe, a beautiful but superficial lawyer, Tommy describes being with Jo as being himself: “What I want is to be me. In my own skin, laughing, real. I laugh until I cry with you, several times a week” (171). Beginning to let go of the expectations that he places on himself for the benefit of others, Tommy develops as a character and forms a real partnership with Jo, similarly emphasizing the theme of The Search for a Romantic Soulmate.

Sarah sees Jenni as her closest friend in LA and is deeply grateful for her friendship, describing her as seeming to have been “shipped in by courier” when she had very few friends in the new city (101). Jenni is characterized by a strong need to take care of others, in part due to desperation about reaching her late thirties without having children. She is deeply in love with her partner, Javier, despite what Sarah describes as his emotional limitations, and the pair undergo an IVF cycle that is characterized as their last chance during the course of the novel. It ultimately fails.

Jenni meets Sarah by chance, in an office building in which she and Rueben are renting a desk, and Jenni eventually comes to work for the Clowndoctor charity. Jenni is romantic and optimistic. Sarah notes, “She was nothing like me, or anyone I’d ever known, and I liked her all the more for it” (102). Jenni operates as a foil to Sarah, both when characterized as a hopeless romantic and in their respective attitudes to pregnancy. In opposition to Sarah’s perspective of abject fear of parenthood due to her experience with Alex, Jenni feels prepared and desperate for parenthood but is unable to achieve it.

Jenni is characterized as deeply caring and self-sacrificing but also exhibits denial when she tells Sarah that the pregnancy test is the next day, although it has already taken place. Sarah hears “the desperate sound of his wife, [her] loyal friend; who’d postponed her own grief so she could look after [Sarah’s], gasping for breath as tears and despair erupted savagely from within” (186). Her narrative arc involves focusing on caring for others, particularly Sarah, to avoid her own feelings on her desperation to have a child, then eventually processing her grief and envisioning a different path for her life.

Sarah’s parents are primarily characterized through the perspective of Sarah and other characters. Sarah sees them as “kind, solid, assured,” but “mildly alcoholic” (133). Sarah reminds herself not to put them on a pedestal and suggests that “they’ve just dealt with things in a different way” (133). Eddie recalls always viewing the family as close and functional in comparison to his own when he met them during the course of Hannah and Alex’s friendship. Sarah describes her parents as “still so happy together” and reflects on the reliability with which her father had acted when dating her mother (134), in opposition to Sarah’s experience with Eddie. Sarah’s parents are described as having gone to great lengths to facilitate reconciliation between their daughters and as being thrilled when that event finally occurs. They function as secondary characters throughout the novel who support the plot by offering Sarah a happy view of romantic relationships.

Sarah’s elderly grandfather is described as cantankerous, continually complaining, for whom caring is difficult. Sarah’s mother describes him as a “rotten old bastard” (133), which she says that she is allowed to say because she loves him and because she is his daughter. Their relationship contributes to the novel’s thematic ideas about Fear, Pain, and Love in Parental Relationships. He becomes a more complex character through the interaction in which he finds Sarah crying. As she enters the room, Sarah is affected by the fact that he has attempted to straighten his bedsheets and thinks that “[a] need for order, even amid the chaos, was something [she] understood” (141). He is critical of her actions after having been ghosted, but he tells her that he does understand. He shares the experience of meeting the love of his life, Ruby Merryfield, a woman whom his parents forbade him to marry because she’d had a child out of wedlock. He notes that he cared about Sarah’s grandmother and doesn’t regret having had children with her, but that if he could do it again, he “would not have given up” (143). In comparison to his ornery manner elsewhere, this vulnerability is striking, and his generosity in sharing this secret suggests his affection for his granddaughter.

Sarah’s younger sister, Hannah, is not initially present in the narrative except through Sarah’s reflections, given their long estrangement. She is a sympathetic character by virtue of Walsh leading the reader to assume that something has happened to her, but she does not function as a complex character. As a child, Sarah describes her sister as “a tiny bulldozer” (5) and as “utterly fearless” (115). Hannah has a small character development arc: After she and Sarah have reconciled, Hannah is self-critical for having been unkind to her sister, though Sarah does not agree with this assessment. She sees a counselor to cope with disliking herself.

Sarah describes her ex-husband as an “effete American clown” without malice (30) and characterizes their relationship as based on a balance of need that dissipates when Sarah ceases to need him. Having trained as a clown—but viewing the goal this training as being a theater practitioner rather than a trite entertainer—Rueben expresses passion for his and Sarah’s joint endeavor with the Clowndoctor nonprofit. Rueben wants to have a child, and Sarah identifies her refusal to have a baby with him as the ultimate catalyst for their breakup.

Rueben’s new girlfriend, Kaia, functions at first as a stereotype of an LA yogi who is focused on healthy eating and mindfulness. Sarah suggests that she isn’t beautiful in a traditional sense, but “glowed, in a slow-cooked, wholesome way” (119). Kaia kindly hides her salad when Sarah is feeling nauseous to avoid making her feel worse, and Sarah thinks, “I wish she weren’t so good at handling me […] Or so bloody thoughtful” (202). Sarah can’t find anything to dislike about her, describing her as pure and good.

Kaia gains complexity as a character when it is revealed that she had a son who died of cancer, and a clowndoctor’s visit to his oncology ward was the reason for the connection with Rueben and the charity. In this sense, Kaia functions as a foil to Carole Wallace. Both women have lost a child, but Kaia’s experience of moving forward has been starkly different from Carole’s. Sarah describes that “at some point” in Kaia’s grief process, “when she was able to get out of bed, to breath, she had arrived in the nonprofit sector [...] because it felt like the only conceivable way of forging good from bad” (206). Further, that Sarah regards Kaia with admiration—first for her general goodness and then for her strength in carrying on after her loss—serves to characterize both women: Kaia in her own right and Sarah for sidestepping pettiness.