Published April 8, 2026 at 4:22 PM CDT

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On this episode of the "Book Public" podcast, host Yvette Benavides speaks with author Laurie Hertzel about her memoir, “Ghosts of Fourth Street: My Family, a Death, and the Hills of Duluth.”

Laurie Hertzel was the seventh child out of 10 children in her family. Growing up in Duluth Minnesota, she was too young to hang out with the big siblings and didn’t quite fit in with the “Three Little Kids,” as she refers to the younger siblings who formed a clique that she didn't fit into. So she kept to herself—a wandering, watchful child.

Her father was a college professor. Her mother raised the ten children. They were by some accounts not the warmest parents and weren’t very communicative.

In some instances, the chronic angers of the house were too much and meant the children were always steeped in silence or in secrets.

When Laurie’s brother Bobby dies in an accident, the silences grow deeper and darker.

Laurie was only nine years old. The family never talked about his death.

Those gaps in communication seemed to swallow everything up, ingesting the family into an even darker dimension of grief.

This was an earlier era — the 1960s and 1970s. Life had to go on in some way in Duluth. There was still school, and chores and snow and extended family and holidays. Life simmered on.

But the loss of her brother and its aftermath affected Laurie. The fraught environment she grew up in where her parents’ behavior could be unpredictable, became something to fear — or at least to hide from in the small nooks of a crowded house.

Laurie remains observant. Her favorite pastime is reading.

She became a journalist — someone who wanted to turn the light on the truth. As a memoirist trying to tell the story of her childhood, that option was not always met with understanding from members of her family.

Because her inspiration was always the truth and the story of a brother she wanted to remember, another option was writing this memoir.

Guest: Laurie Hertzel is the author of the memoir "Ghosts of Fourth Street: My Family, a Death, and the Hills of Duluth." It’s published by the University of Minnesota Press