How to Sell a Haunted House

Louise is the protagonist of How to Sell a Haunted House. When the story begins, she is living in San Francisco with her five-year-old daughter, Poppy. Although she considers herself to be separate from her family, the death of her parents draws her back to Charleston and back into her family’s complicated history.

Louise considers herself an overachiever. At the age of five, she turned away from her mother’s puppets and left the creative, imaginative world behind. It is important to her to feel in control, and she finds this feeling more difficult to achieve as supernatural events unfold around her. When she feels out of control or vulnerable, Louise reacts with anger, which is mainly directed at Mark throughout the book. In her relationship with her parents, Louise identifies with her father and finds comfort in his reliability and calm. She has a more troubled relationship with her mother, connecting to the theme of The Challenges of Mother-Daughter Relationships. She becomes angry with her mother for her favoritism of Mark and at the betrayal in which she feels like her mother sacrificed them to Pupkin.

Louise’s journey throughout the novel is to reconnect with her family, and more specifically, her brother, Mark.