Kara A. Kennedy on exploring ghosts as a metaphor for past trauma
When someone leaves you, whether by tragedy or by choice, are they actually gone?
About four years ago, this was a thought I couldn’t get out of my head. I’ve been a lifelong lover of ghost stories, and as I was trying to narrow down my next writing project, I couldn’t shake the desire to write something creepy – a story where ghosts would feel as real as a friend, as a person you pass on the street.
If you’re interested in ghosts like I am, you’ll have heard the theory that they stick around because they can’t move on. Maybe they have unfinished business in the land of the living, questions they never got to ask, answers they never received. In early 2020, I was sitting at a red light when a concept struck me like a bolt of lightning: isn’t that just like a toxic relationship? Whether romantic or platonic, troubled relationships often come to cataclysmic ends, leaving unanswered questions and echoes and shadows in their wake. And what do you do with all those lingering emotions? Cling tightly to them? Try to bring them back to life? Hold an exorcism?
That was when I knew I had my next book idea.
In I Will Never Leave You, seventeen-year-old Maya is struggling to free herself from an emotionally abusive relationship with Alana, her longtime girlfriend. When Alana dies under suspicious circumstances, her ghost comes back with a vengeance, issuing Maya a chilling ultimatum—help her possess another girl or go down for her murder. Maya’s ultimate choice comes in the form of deciding how far she’s willing and able to go in order to free herself.
From the earliest days of drafting I Will Never Leave You, it was a ghost story to the core. When we go through traumatic events, the remaining evidence is everywhere: you look in the mirror and it pops up behind you. You hear a song, smell a specific scent, catch a glimpse of a familiar face, and you’re catapulted to a different time and place. In I Will Never Leave You, Maya is very much living in a state of heightened anxiety where she’s not only trying to avoid memories of her abuser, she’s seeing her spirit physically manifest in front of her, often in the moments when she feels weakest. I think anyone would agree that this would be a terrible state in which to exist, and it felt to me like a tremendous vehicle to explore ghosts as a metaphor for trauma.
Many books, movies, and TV shows have used a similar metaphor to great effect; in particular, I was hugely inspired by Mike Flanagan’s work. Writer and director of Netflix originals like The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and Midnight Mass, he’s used paranormal entities as commentary on generational and religious trauma, and doesn’t shy away from exploring every nuance of grief. In the YA fiction world, I’ve long been an admirer of Nina Lacour, particularly the way she examines healing from trauma through a paranormal lens in her novel Watch Over Me. For my debut novel, I was excited to step into this rich emotional space and turn my focus to ghosts as metaphors for the trauma of emotional abuse, essentially creating a haunted house that Maya could step into and confront her inner demons.
As I developed Maya’s relationship with Alana, I took great care to help the reader see why Maya loved her in the first place. This was a special relationship for her, formative in helping her find her place in the world, which makes it all the more difficult when she begins to pull at the thread of their tenuous connection. What do you do when you love someone so deeply, but begin to realize you would be so much happier and healthier without them? My goal was to accurately depict the push-pull dynamic that survivors can feel at the end of an abusive relationship – you’re ready to be free and start over, but at the same time, there are those moments of what if. What if I could find the perfect words to make this person love me again, and everything went back to normal? What if I figured out the right questions to ask, and got the answers I deserve?
These are valid questions that Maya struggles to answer throughout the novel. Even more pressing is her need to do something about Alana’s haunting, a physical presence that only she can see. While I chose to use a speculative lens and craft this narrative in the form of a ghost story, I think – I hope – that many people can relate to these themes in the here and now. If readers take anything from I Will Never Leave You, I hope it’s the message that while hauntings can be frightening, they don’t have to define you or determine your path forward. Only you can do that.
I Will Never Leave by Kara A. Kennedy is out in paperback on 23 July (published by Ink Road)
