Culture Highlights 2024: Summoning the ghosts of loved ones

Jane Fraser

Despite following the multi-talented and multi-faceted writer and all-round creative, Jeff Young, on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, I put my hand up and say that I had never read any of his writing.

That was until I fortuitously encountered a feature written by him for the Observer New Review as I was scrolling through the news one Saturday morning in late September.

It was an encounter of the best possible kind, where I came upon his prose for the first time: prose that was poetic yet pellucid, devoid of pretension and brimming with real emotion and not sentimentality.

Resonated

The topic resonated with me too: caring for his ninety-two-year-old father who had become lost in what he termed ‘dementia land’ where be navigated the frightening shifts between past and present.

I’d lost my ninety-two-year-old mother to dementia two years earlier, And for the first time since, I shed tears.

I wanted more of this writer’s work. And it was there waiting for me all this time at Little Toller Books. I immediately ordered ‘Ghost Town. And ‘Wild Twin’ as I knew I wasn’t going to be disappointed.

‘Ghost Town’ invites the reader to walk with the author, Young (as Young did with Horatio Clare in one chapter) through Liverpool, his home for over sixty-five years and a place with which he enjoys a bitter-sweet love affair.

While he walks, memories are stirred, ghosts are called-up, a whole plethora of emotions brought into play. Memories seep in through the pores of the skin, up through the soles of the feet as he pounds the pavements, searching out the past in this book which he calls, ‘A Liverpool Shadowplay’.

Psychogeography

For after all, the past is always with us in the present, tacked firmly to our heels and ‘memory is shifting, dissolving’ as Young so eloquently puts it. It’s difficult to classify a work like this. Some have called it a biography; others a love-letter to Liverpool.

I might be missing something, but I think I might call it a deep map or a psychogeography as according to the 1955 Guy Debord definition psychogeography is: “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographic environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotional behaviour of individuals.”

However you might feel the need to classify it, ‘Ghost Town’ was shortlisted for the 2020 Biography Costa Prize, and most definitely had an effect on the emotional behaviour of this reader.

I have recently started reading ‘Wild Twin’ which charts the journey of the ‘feral drifter’ and version of himself that Jeff Young calls the ‘wild twin’, from the 1970’s to present day Liverpool. For some uncanny reason, I felt compelled to start at part three, where Young fever-dreams his former travels while caring for his father, ‘a man who can no longer remember,’ and who has been failed by a broken care system.

Again there were tears as Young, through his writing, and his grief, enabled me to summon ‘the ghosts of loved ones.’

‘Wild Twin’ has recently been shortlisted for The Edward Stanford Travel Book of the Year 2025, presented by Viking.