Throughout A Head Full of Ghosts, I had always thought that adding “The Last Final Girl” blog chapters, which analyze the show and surrounding events directly, put more space between myself the reader and the supposed real events recanted by Merry in the book. I was still unsure of what purpose it served within the story of A Head Full of Ghosts as a whole, other than to give us information about the Possession’s actual television episodes. I had been wondering why Tremblay would create this alias (Karen Brissette) for Merry to write about the show, instead of just having her recall the episodes as they pertained to events that happened, drawing conclusions, comparing, and contrasting the two side-by-side, rather separating them.
Towards the end of the book, I learned of what happened to the family during the end of the show and post-production, i.e. the poisoning. With this new information, I realized just how painful all of the memories related to the show must be. It began to make more sense to me why Merry would create an alias to write about the show as if she had not experienced it. It seemed to me like she was trying to convince herself that she had not lived those experiences, and I think Rachel puts it perfectly when she asks Merry how she found the “distance” (pg. 257) to write about the events of the show. I believe that the blog was a way for her to create that distance. In the blog “Karen,” while speaking about the dinner on the show the night of the exorcism, writes “Mmmm . . . Chinese Food. . .” as if the Merry behind those words had not recalled never being able to stand the taste of the Chinese duck sauce because of that night.
Merry writes the blog as Karen, in order to create a much-needed distance between herself and the events related to the show, in order to help her forgetfully remember the traumatic experiences.
Works Cited:
Tremblay, Paul. A Head Full of Ghosts: A Novel. New York, NY: William Morrow, an Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2015. Print.