The Publisher Says: What if we responded to death... by throwing a party?

By the time Erica Buist’s father-in-law Chris was discovered, upstairs in his bed, his book resting on his chest, he had been dead for over a week. She searched for answers (the artery-clogging cheeses in his fridge?) and tried to reason with herself (does daughter-in-law even feature in the grief hierarchy?) and eventually landed on an inevitable, uncomfortable truth: everybody dies.

With Mexico’s Day of the Dead festivities as a starting point, Erica decided to confront death head-on by visiting seven death festivals around the world—one for every day they didn’t find Chris. From Mexico to Nepal, Sicily, Thailand, Madagascar, Japan and finally Indonesia—with a stopover in New Orleans, where the dead outnumber the living ten to one—Erica searched for the answers to both fundamental and unexpected questions around death anxiety.

This Party’s Dead is the account of her journey to understand how other cultures deal with mortal terror, how they move past the knowledge that they’re going to die in order to live happily day-to-day, how they celebrate rather than shy away from the topic of death – and how when this openness and acceptance are passed down through the generations, death suddenly doesn’t seem so scary after all.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I grew up in the Southwest. It's part of my mental furniture to know what calaveras are and to appreciate that marigolds are the right floral tributes on Día de los Muertos. Skeletons, and skulls, are endlessly fascinating. An old artist-friend of mine created one of my most treasured possessions, sadly destroyed in a move, of a drawing she entitled "Martinis on My Horizon" with stylish skeletons quaffing the elixir of the goddesses, the gin martini.

I am, in other words, the exact reader Author Buist aimed at. She shot; she scored.

I found her grief for the death of her friend Chris, father of her future husband, entirely ordinary. He sounds to me like someone it would very much hurt to lose. And, since humankind can't physiologically stay in protracted peak states like grieving, what better way to cope with the pain than toss a party? The author's dedicatory "Love is not a reward, and death is not a punishment. If you thought they were, this book is for you," made me legs twitch with the fight-or-flight response. It's that true, it's that deep.

What made me glad that I got the book from the publisher via Edelweiss+ is the timelessness of grief and grieving. Every generation of humans feels it, which is why we have so many grave goods for archaeologists to plunder and ponder; many of our animal cohabitants seem to as well, eg elephants and crows; life being, then not being, inside someone we know and love is just flat weird. My old friend D'Anne died just before Christmas. I'd known her for fifty-three years. All the things that meant something to her in relation to me are now only in my mind. It's...strange.

And I hope her current husband is planning a bash! She'd've loved that. It's a great way to remember someone. As witness some of the author's rowdier experiences of parties where the guest of honor isn't breathing anymore. Offering the dead many of life's little luxuries has an old and distinguished history. The Japanese and Chinese, in today's cultural landscape, are the masters of the offerings with many things like paper iPhones burnt for the departed's use in the afterlife. Mexico's Day of the Dead isn't quite that au courant but it's got the best material culture, the calaveras de azúcar offered to the ancestors:

...and the modern innovation of the Día de los Muertos parade that the James Bond film Spectre made popular before COVID killed it, too.

So as I said, the author found her dream reader here. Why, then, didn't I rate the read more highly? I enjoyed it. I was educated by it, as painlessly as I think is possible. But the very thing that made it a painless read, a lovely glass of juice with a hefty glug of 151 rum in it (as the author discovers in New Orleans, visiting the Museum of Death and quaffing a Hurricane at Pat O'Brien's for afters), makes it feel more like it's about Author Buist on a weird kind of very amusing dark tourism trip. (I myownself vote that we start normalizing "thanatourism" for this; it's not necessarily dark!), is the thing that wore thin: It's about her. Her grief, her loss. Learning about other cultures was her way of coping, of giving her husband support in his own grieving process.

I know that's what it said on the tin. I know that's the explicit purpose for the book's existence. I support the author's quest and am glad I made her acquaintance, happy that her journey was rewarded as richly as it was in ways familiar and unfamiliar as her friends and her bosses and her husband made room for it all.

But I can't help my feeling of slight "I'm done now"ness. Her job, ably performed, merits the full four stars. Her amusing and emotionally resonant narrative voice merit the other half-star. But the tone, in the end, brought my personal enjoyment down from all the stars to almost all of them.

Still very much a book I'd urge you to make room for on your shelf. ( )

This Party's Dead by Erica Buist inhabits a space where memoirs both inform and frame a nonfiction informational book on a given topic. This can be a dangerous area, some readers will not want the memoir parts and some would probably be happy with fewer facts and more memoir and personal feelings. I found Buist to have found a nice place that will, I think, satisfy the vast majority of readers, just enough of each to complement the other.

Her initial story, her future father-in-law dying and not being found for seven days, sets up both the premise for tour of death festivals as well as the issue of how people face death, their own and those of loved ones. I found reading about her personal grief strategy (or lack thereof) helped to set up in broad terms how western society largely thinks about death, in particular the UK. This opened the door for her questions she asked of the many people she met in her travels. She also acknowledges her privilege, namely gaining financial advantage from someone's death, which she admits to feeling uneasy with and undeserving of.

The personal aspect of her journey (physical, intellectual, and emotional) worked very well for me, I found myself more open to her questions and comments simply because she was speaking from a lot of experience and not just from reading she did on the topic.

Reading this will, or at least it did for me, make readers think about death in a more nuanced way. Yet even by taking this journey with Buist, and experiencing these festivals largely through her eyes, we will all likely arrive at different destinations. Some traditions may speak to you more than others, while others you may dismiss out of hand. Buist allows enough room in her narrative for readers to do this without feeling they are "opposing" her ideas or feelings. If there is one thing this book absolutely illustrates is that death is both the most personal and the most public thing most of us will experience.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via Edelweiss. ( )