Grief leaves its mark in silence, in questions, and sometimes—in stories.
When Susan Swartz died by suicide in 2020, the columnist’s daughter, bestselling ghostwriter Samantha Rose, began writing through the pain. The result is Giving Up the Ghost: A Daughter’s Memoir, a book released earlier this year—the fifth anniversary of Swartz’s death.
This Sunday, Rose brings the book to Occidental Center for the Arts for an afternoon of readings and conversation.
The book is a raw, unflinching examination of grief, identity and family legacy. It’s also Rose’s first book under her own name after penning 17 for others as a ghostwriter, which adds another wrinkle to how readers might perceive the memoir’s title.
“Giving Up the Ghost began as an exercise to better understand and untangle my mother’s irrevocable choice,” she says. “But as I got deeper into the writing, truths about my own life began to emerge—most notably, that I’d become a ghost in my own life, professionally and personally, and that writing my story was a deliberate step out of the shadows. It challenged me to become visible and use my voice in a way I hadn’t in years.”
That act of stepping into the light—professionally, emotionally and creatively—is central to Giving Up the Ghost. For years, Rose has worked behind the scenes, ghostwriting bestsellers for others, with clients whose names regularly appeared on bestseller lists and in glossy magazines. This time, the story was hers.
“There’s a greater sense of creative freedom in telling your own story (one can say whatever they want), but it’s much more vulnerable and messy,” she explains. “I understood pretty quickly that I wasn’t only exploring my mother’s suicide; I was channeling my grief onto the page. It was important to me to capture my emotional honesty, in its raw and conflicting form, which meant writing without holding back. Because I’m a much more disciplined ghostwriter, I had to trust a more intuitive process—and know that I could edit myself later.”
The result is a memoir that often reads like it’s unfolding in real time.
“Giving Up the Ghost was published nearly five years to the day of my mother’s death, but I started writing about it in real time, as it was all happening in 2020,” Rose says. “I think this is why readers tell me they feel the visceral shock, rage and regret alongside me. Much of the dialogue wasn’t reconstructed, either; I wrote it as I heard it in conversation with my son, my sisters and my grief counselor. In that way, the structure of the story was created naturally.”
For readers who knew Susan Swartz through her local column and activism, Giving Up the Ghost also offers a personal and nuanced view of a woman many appreciated from afar.
“I admired her and was so proud of her influential career,” Rose says. “When I became a journalist, I continued to regard her as ‘the writer’ in the family, and me as the ghost. As I explore our mother-daughter dynamic in the book, I come to understand that I have a bigger role to play, and Mom encourages me in one of our dream sequence dialogues when she says, ‘I’m the ghost now. It’s time for me to step aside and for you to step forward.’”
The memoir is candid not only about loss, but about what follows: the reckoning, the remembering, the silence that suicide can leave in its wake.
“I hope it inspires people to tell the truth, to share the scary thing out loud,” Rose says. “For a variety of reasons I explore in the book, my mother didn’t seek the preventative care that may have helped her because she was resistant to engage in an honest conversation about her mental health. I feel that it is my responsibility, given how she suffered, to create an opening to talk about suicide and to remind people that asking for help may be the single act that saves a life.”
The North Bay community has responded with an outpouring of support.
“The response has been overwhelmingly positive,” she says. “Many people have told me that the book has finally allowed them to heal. Others have said it’s helped them better understand my mother and the complexities of suicide. Some of my favorite notes have been from people who didn’t know my mom and who have reached out to say—thank you for introducing me to Susan.”
Rose, who studied journalism at San Francisco State University and mass communication at Sonoma State University, is also the principal of Yellow Sky Media, a boutique editorial agency in Petaluma. Still, Giving Up the Ghost pushed her beyond any deadline she’d known.
“I treated this project like all others in terms of practice—I wrote every day for nearly eight months and kept myself on a strict deadline,” she says. “That said, the narrative took many surprising turns along the way, specifically in the second part of the book when I start ghostwriting the ghost of my dead mother by initiating conversations between this world and the next. This channeled writing process provided many aha and insightful moments I hadn’t seen coming, and that eventually helped me to move forward with my life.”
That forward motion continues this weekend—the OCA event falls on Memorial Day, apropos for a book that, in part, explores how we hold the memories of those we’ve lost.
“I hope it reminds people to remember my mother’s life more than her death,” Rose says. “Her ending was tragic, but it was just one moment, and the 76 years leading up to it were filled with many moments marked by curiosity, great humor and wit, and a deep belief in the power of beauty, fairness and friendship. She would want that to be her legacy.”
Giving Up the Ghost: A Daughter’s Memoir—Reading & Conversation with Samantha Rose goes from 3-5pm, Sunday, May 25, Occidental Center for the Arts, 3850 Doris Murphy Way. Admission is free. Donations welcome. Book sales and signing to follow. For more info: occidentalcenterforthearts.org. More about the author at yellowskymedia.com and instagram.com/samantharose_writer.
