THE END OF THE STORY
We read to know we are not alone — even in death
Pick up a young adult book and it probably will be mind-soppingly sad where someone dies. John Green’s Fault in Our Stars was one of the bestsellers in the teen market; Hazel, a 16-year-old cancer patient, meets and falls in love with another cancer stricken patient. Teens devoured the book while confronting the inevitability of death on every page. Maybe this was the answer to its success — writing accessibly about something still not considered polite dinner talk with the family. Plenty others have followed — and there’s quite a few new ones on the horizon. In Like Water by Rebecca Podos, restless Savannah realises she might not be able to escape her small home town — her father has been diagnosed with Huntington’s disease and Savannah is forced to wait until she can be tested for the disease. David Barclay Moore’s The Stars Beneath Our Feet follows Lolly whose brother is accidentally gunned down in a gang drive-by in Harlem just months before Christmas. Cue important conversations about death that teens are willing to have, read about and not suppress.
Nonviolence against women
In the literary section, death has been given a breath of fresh air with the cleverly constructed Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker last year and fans everywhere for American novelist George Saunders. Taking place in a Washington cemetery, it tells the story of President Abraham Lincoln mourning the loss of his son. It’s told through the different souls that exist in a special expanse — the bardo, which is an intermediate space between life and rebirth. In Jim Crace’s new novel, The Melody, Alfred, a famous singer, has to deal with his wife’s death and retirement. It’s a tricky study of grief that Crace does well.
Death in thrillers have remained the standard fare, yet there is a movement to stem the tide of women being the victims in the pages. Bridget Lawless, a screenwriter, has launched an award for a thriller novel in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered. Called the Staunch Book Prize, the winner will be announced in October and will be awarded
£2 000. Lawless told The Bookseller that she believes that “strong role models both real and invented are incredibly important to women’s fight for equality” and that “fiction can do a fantastic job of showing what can happen when women stand up and speak out about injustice and refuse to be victimised”. She added: “I want to find the writers who’ve come up with something different.”
Many female crime authors have disagreed with this. Sophie Hannah, in an opinion piece for The Guardian, wrote: “The Staunch prize could instead have been created to honour the novel that most powerfully or sensitively tackles the problem of violence against women and girls. Reading the eligibility criteria, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the prize actively sets out to discourage crime fiction, even of the highest quality, that tackles violence against women head-on. And discourage it has.”
Gloomy bestsellers
But it is death memoirs that are the most prevalent at the moment — becoming bestsellers despite the gloom of the subject matter. When Breath Becomes Air by neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi became such a bestseller that people were calling other death memoirs “this year’s Paul Kalanithi”. There are already quite a few available in 2018. With the End in Mind by Kathryn Mannix is marketed for the grieving and bereaved, ill and healthy. As the blurb says she writes about people “who are like you, and like people you know and love. You will meet Holly, who danced her last day away; Eric, the retired head teacher who, even with Motor Neurone Disease, gets things done; loving, tenderhearted Nelly and Joe, each living a lonely lie to save their beloved from distress; and Sylvie, 19, dying of leukaemia, sewing a cushion for her mum to hug after she has died.”
In From Here to Eternity, Caitlin Doughty writes about death from her perspective as a practising mortician. She sets out to search cultures that do not share our terror of dead bodies. She participates in the different death practices such as the Japanese ritual of kotsuage, in which people use chopsticks to pluck their loved one’s bones from the cremation beds.
Maybe the reason for the popularity of the death memoir is that they offer us some sort of illumination in the high-speed, social media craze we live in. That these books, novels and nonfiction, offer us some insights on how to live by preparing us for death.
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