Personal Shopper

So what’s the significance of a “personal shopper” discovering she has the medium’s power to communicate with the world of spirits?

That’s the point when Maureen Cartwright starts sensing ghostly spirits. The first is when she checks her dead twin brother Lewis’s house for his friends who want to buy it. They want assurance that if there are spirits they are friendly not malevolent.  

She feels another alien presence when she finds her tycoon boss savagely slaughtered, another when her sister-in-law’s new man assures her of his friend, her brother, Lewis’s understanding. Lewis sensed she shared his power, as they shared the same mortal heart defect. 
     Visiting her boyfriend in Dubai Maureen encounters another, whose film-ending message is yes, the power is within her.

In a parody of these disembodied voices and influences, her boss’s rejected lover hustles and hassles Maureen with anonymous and unsettling text messages. To him she admits her attraction to and fear of the forbidden. Talking to the dead ranks in there, along with any Frankensteinian presumption to transcend the proper borders of mortal existence. 

There’s a continuum from the characters’ conversations in person, through Skype and cell phone calls, emails, and those mysterious unsettling texts, and on out into the messages from the dead. Her boyfriend’s job is the cognate cyber security. He sets up internet security protocols for the Dubai government. 

  The point of the title and the heroine’s dissatisfying and empty job is that she outgrows it. She abandons the search through the trivial material world and extends herself into the spiritualist. She accepts the challenge and distinction of the woman painter whose spiritualism inspired her abstract paintings before the genre was established.  
     The personal shopper is the boss’s agent or intermediary, searching out and buying/borrowing the clothes and accessories the star needs to flaunt but hasn't the time or inclination to find for herself. In the course of this ghost story Maureen stops finding for her boss and finds herself. From mediating with fashonistas and jewellers she turns to mediating between our material world and the transcending world beyond it. That’s where she discovers her fullest potential as a person.