Laurie Hertzel. (Photo by Doug Iverson)

Book reviewer and Duluth native Laurie Hertzel has been fascinated with memories, ghosts and reading since she was a child. Her third book and second memoir, Ghosts of Fourth Street: My Family, a Death, and the Hills of Duluth, details the quiet lives of the Hertzel family through the young author’s eyes — growing up in Duluth in the 1960s, scraping her knees, slumber parties and a Ouija board, a distaste for pineapple sundaes — and culminates in her family’s most private moment, the death of her eldest sibling, John Patrick “Bobby” Hertzel, and its aftermath.

“I have always felt really, really close to the child that I was when I was six, seven, eight, nine years old, and I do remember thoughts that I had then,” Hertzel said. “I was a very observant child, and I was a very solitary child, even in a big house with 11 other people. I like to be alone, and I liked to watch other people to see what was going on.”

The Hertzel home of 12 subsisted meagerly on the single paycheck of Laurie’s father, and privacy was in short supply. Laurie spent her early days roaming Duluth or trying to find a quiet nook in the home to read. Family dinners were mandatory and structured, milk came in glass bottles, and holidays were long and loud. Bobby’s death was the one incident the Hertzels never spoke about.

John Patrick “Bobby” Hertzel’s obituary as it appeared in the June 13, 1966 edition of the Duluth Herald.

As a young child, Laurie understood mentioning her brother was inappropriate, but she began to worry about what would happen to Bobby’s memory if her family stopped talking about him.

“I think there is a lot when these stories go away, because a story can help you understand your family,” Hertzel said. “They may give you insight, and in a way, these family stories are our legacy. It’s sad to lose that.”

Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Hertzel moved to Duluth at the age of two. The seventh of 10 children, she attended Endion Elementary School, where several scenes from the book take place, and went on to study at the College of St. Scholastica and University of Minnesota Duluth, but did not receive a bachelor’s degree from either. She had an 18-and-a-half year stint as a reporter for the Duluth News Tribune before leaving for the Twin Cities to work at Minnesota Monthly, and later became an editor for books at the Minnesota Star Tribune. She currently resides in St. Paul.

Hertzel enjoyed her job at the Star Tribune but recognized she wasn’t writing as much as she would’ve liked, and looked for other vehicles to express herself.

“I just realized after about 10 years, ‘I think of myself as a writer but all I’m doing is editing,’ and that’s why I started my blog,” Hertzel said. “It was just a way of telling stories and start finding my voice again and start writing on a regular basis.”

Hertzel’s blog ”Life With Three Dogs” covered, among other topics, her dogs, nature, her childhood, and her career. Some of these early tales would be written about again as episodes in the front half of Ghosts of Fourth Street.

Work on the book began while Hertzel was attending Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina, about a decade ago. Having always written about her brother’s death –beginning with a story she wrote in high school called “The Dandelion” — she chose it as her thesis topic for her Master of Fine Arts degree.

“Things make sense after you put them on the page, it’s a way of clarifying things and understanding what happened,” Hertzel said. “And so I wrote about that my whole life.”

“When I got to grad school, I needed a thesis, right?” she continued. “So I started putting these things together in a more cohesive way and rewriting things and telling the stories differently, and that became my thesis. Then, after I graduated, I just kind of set it aside.”

Not wanting to publish Ghosts of Fourth Street while her mother Trish was alive — her father had passed away in 2004 — Hertzel squirreled away drafts of the book until she was convinced to publish its central chapter, the one detailing Bobby’s passing, in a literary journal in 2021. Incensed by her portrayal in the excerpt, and the fact that she wrote about their family’s most sensitive moment, Trish never spoke to Laurie again, and passed away in 2024.

As a retired journalist and seasoned memoirist, Hertzel is familiar with the fallibility of memory, even her own. She consulted multiple family members while writing her book, recognizing her memories may be incorrect. As she acknowledges in the book’s prologue, Ghosts of Fourth Street isn’t journalism, and any one of her siblings could’ve written each scene completely differently. When two memories can’t be reconciled, Hertzel errs on the side of caution, and offers multiple perspectives to her readers.

“I’m aware that what I remember could be wrong, because it’s just true that the more we go over memories, the more they change in our heads,” Hertzel said. “And we don’t realize that that’s what we’re doing, but we are. We’re changing it, we’re emphasizing different things slightly. We are adding perspective of things that we know now that we didn’t know then, and none of this is conscious or deliberate.”

“I was aware, as I wrote this book, that my memories are completely fallible,” Hertzel continued. “But this is how I remember it.”

Laurie and Leo J. “Guv” Hertzel in front of their Fourth Street home. After retirement, Guv became an adjunct professor at the College of St. Scholastica and helped create the Growing Up American, Prose for Principals and Words and Place summer institutes. Photo provided by Laurie Hertzel

Laurie’s father, Leo J. Hertzel or “Guv,” as she was required to call him, was a patriarch of emotional extremes, especially compared to the cool headed, yet detached Trish. As an English professor at UMD and later at the University of Wisconsin-Superior, an editor of various publications such as The Great Lakes Sailor, and a writer himself, Guv believed avid readership was a mark of civility and class.

He instilled in his children a love of books from birth, to the point where, as Laurie recalls in Ghosts of Fourth Street, reading got her out of doing chores. Always a quiet and reserved book worm, she knew she would be a writer like her father, though her mother urged her to be a secretary. Laurie is one of several writers in her family: one of her sisters writes mysteries and another sister is a poet, among other writing siblings. Bobby was a poet as well, and spent his nights clacking away on a typewriter.

“My younger self just figured I’d be a writer,” Hertzel said. “I thought that I would write books, that I would live in a cabin somewhere with a whole bunch of cats, which now, you know, that just sounds like hell to me — I don’t like cats. And I have a husband, he wasn’t a part of the dream when I was 10.”

While Hertzel may no longer be a cat fan, she has two dogs: Rosie and the hyperreactive Angus, whom Hertzel intends to write a novel about in the future.

Hertzel doesn’t visit Duluth much anymore, but when she does visit, she passes by her old Fourth Street home, its exterior faintly changed in the six decades since the events of Ghosts of Fourth Street. It’s currently rented by college students, décor complete with beer bottle graveyards — additions Laurie can’t imagine Guv and Trish would’ve appreciated.

Ghosts of Fourth Street is available via University of Minnesota Press at upress.umn.edu. Zenith Bookstore is hosting a Ghosts of Fourth Street launch event at Ursa Minor Brewing on Thursday, April 7 at 7 p.m. Hertzel will be discussing the book and her writing career with Duluth-based best-selling author Leif Enger.