ISBN 978-0-9783793-8-4
BookLand Press
When a young university student is assigned the task of writing her obituary by her Journalism professor, she procrastinates. Who wants to think about their own death?
An obituary is really about life – how one has lived it – and the assignment sends Maxine down a road of hopes and dreams, what she imagines her life to be.
But life doesn’t unfold in the way Maxine thinks it will. Stopping along a dark highway to help a stranger with car trouble, Maxine is attacked and left for dead at the side of the road.
But like her life, Maxine’s death is full of unexpected twists of fate. Her ghost tells the tale from the otherworld, an unearthly place where a renegade angel helps her escape the boredom of paradise, and God makes random appearances as a disembodied Voice, a snoring mountain and a manic rock star. Maxine, it seems, is never as much alive as when she is dead.
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“If I were told this was a non-fiction novel written in the style of In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, I’d have believed it. For Dead Girl Diaries by Marianne Paul does feel like non-fiction; and yet it is fiction, a work of the imagination that brings alive a past that was seemingly imprisoned in the dungeons of memory. The narrative is clever, often wiry, audacious and ironic, told from a third person POV by a ghost of the protagonist, Maxine, in her twenties, who is given an assignment by her journalism prof to write her own obituary. Do such profs exist in Canada today? Perish the thought.” ~ Ben Antao
“The writing in Dead Girl Diaries took me away - the poetry and the force. Even the dialogue is created so as to move forward the purpose of the telling, which is to underline the theme of hope, of continuance or relative truth, and always dynamic change.” ~ Elaine Auerbach
