Writing While Haunted by Emily Doyle, author of Please Don't Touch the Body

In the title story of my collection a young woman named Sarah becomes an object of fascination for a ghost. I say “object” because that’s how the ghost treats her—like a plaything designed for his amusement. Sarah wants to feel as if her body is her own, as if she knows where she ends and the rest of the world begins. But the ghost, greedy for her attention, won’t let her.

While working on this story, I stayed in a pool house on a hobby farm in New Jersey. The owner of the house had posted on Facebook saying she would rent the space out to writers on the cheap, so I went. The property was lush and my lodgings were comfortable. I spent mornings swimming in the pool and, after writing, wandering around and watching the owner’s Westies chase dragonflies. But the story wasn’t taking shape.

I had big ambitions for how Sarah’s journey would unfold. I wanted to play with the structure of gothic romances like Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Instead of trapping a young woman in a haunted mansion on a misty moor, I would trap her in a desert suburb of California, in a haunted retirement community. Instead of burdening her with desire for a man who would force her to relive past abuses, she would be in love with another woman and trying to escape those abuses. Most importantly—or so I thought—I would not mention Sarah’s hurts explicitly. That would be too obvious. Anyone who had been violated in the past, especially any woman, would understand what had happened to Sarah without my having to say it outright.

The result of all my ambition was a story that didn’t quite make sense featuring a woman who was not quite knowable. In a workshop that fall, my classmates asked what Sarah’s “deal” was. Why was she so afraid before the appearance of the ghost? I thought, Because! And, If you don’t get it, that’s not my problem. But later, my US editor, Grace McNamee, said she was curious about my intentions for the story. Then she said, “I think it would be powerful to name what happens to Sarah.” Would it be powerful? I’d considered it a capitulation.

Now I wonder if by writing this story I was trying to stage my own ghostly cleansing. A year before, someone I once trusted had run his hands all over me while I was sleeping. I woke up from a dream that thousands of spiders were crawling across my chest, only to realize that the sensation was caused by him touching me. Of course this was just one of several moments when someone had reached for me without my permission or desire. But I did not think “Please Don’t Touch the Body” was about what had happened to me. Or rather, I thought that the story was about what happens, in general, to so many, and that by being specific I would lose that broad applicability.

Still, I trusted my editor, and I wanted to try what she had suggested. I was now back in my apartment in dusty Los Angeles, but Sarah still felt as precious to me as she had while I toiled over her story on the farm in New Jersey. I tried to treat her well as I revised. The result was another version of her journey, this time with explicit—though, I hope, careful—references to Sarah’s childhood and ghostly assaults, and I included a detail from my own life: the dream about the spiders. When I reread the story, I saw her more clearly. I felt I’d said something truer than what I’d said with past drafts. I hope similarly haunted readers agree.