We Are All Pre-Ghosts

I started reading Bellweather Rhapsody by Kate Racculia, and it starts off with a quote by David Foster Wallace: “Every love story is a ghost story.”

I paused on it because we are all pre-ghosts—we just don’t look like one yet—so our love stories WILL become ghost stories. Death is woven into the fabric of life.

David apparently wrote that sentence in a letter to a former teacher. It appears without context:

Wallace skips a few lines and adds the quotation, “Every love story is a ghost story.” The phrase appears as if suspended in the white space surrounding it. After a few more lines is Wallace’s attribution: “Virginia Woolf to Merv Griffin, on the The Merv Griffin Show, 1971.” … My guess is that Wallace made the whole thing up as a joke, I told Max.

The wife of the letter recipient and the author of a DFW biography both try to trace the phrase: who said it first, and what does it mean. In the end, it’s left as a mystery.

Which means you can imagine it means anything that speaks to you.