Erica Buist is a freelance journalist. She writes mostly for The Guardian and Medium, but has also appeared in various literary magazines, The Times, The Mirror, The Debrief, and has been a frequent guest on BBC Radio. Following the unexpected death of her father-in-law, she is travelling to seven death festivals in order to investigate responses to grief and death anxiety, in and outside the west. She is writing a book about the journey called This Party’s Dead, which is available to preorder from Unbound.com.
Kristina Marie Darling: Your book, This Party’s Dead, is forthcoming from Unbound Books. What are three things readers should know before they delve into the work itself?
Erica Buist: When my father-in-law died, I wrote a memoir piece about it for the Guardian, which now forms the basis of my first chapter. Readers should know firstly that the book gets a lot more “real” than any other extracts I’ve published so far. As the idea is to discuss the realities of death and grief, I do describe what happens to a corpse after a week, and I do talk in detail about the effects of a mental health crisis culminating in agoraphobia.
Probably the second thing that readers should know is that while it’s by no means sugar-coated, it is quite funny. Early in my writing life I was a stand-up comedian, and I’m delighted that “you need to make this chapter about your agoraphobia less funny” is the first piece of writing advice I’ve ever ignored.
Third, the seven death festivals I chose to visit (one for every day my father-in-law lay undiscovered) are those that overtly celebrate death and the dead in a way that is joyful. It’s an uplifting read. I swear!
KMD: Unbound Books is an innovative and groundbreaking publishing platform. Tell us about how it works. Also, what drew you to this particular publisher?
EB: Unbound was founded by writers who were tired of the fact that publishers had become very risk-averse – and consequently, books were getting very samey. Whereas traditional publishers say (and I’m paraphrasing), “we think this will sell so we’ll put up the money to publish it and oh boy, you’d better pray you make that back for us in sales – and please enjoy about 5% of the profits”, Unbound’s pitch is: “we think this will sell so we’ll put it on sale now, and when the book reaches a preorder target, the entire system reverts to that of a traditional publisher – except you get 50% of the profits”.
My agent had gone to two publishers with my book idea. They rejected it for opposite reasons: one said “nobody will read a book about death” and the other said “there’s going to be too many books about death” (so yes, everything definitely is meaningless, in case you were wondering!). We were holding off going after any more publishers while we had meetings with a production company who were showing interest in making a documentary – and then, I had a tweet go horribly viral. An editor at Unbound, Joelle Owusu (who is also an excellent writer) saw the tweet, found my project, and asked if Unbound could publish it. I met with her, and she really understood the idea and soul of the project, so I said yes without hesitation.
KMD: As part of the work of this book, you’ve traveled extensively for research purposes. What surprised you most as you toured various death festivals?
EB: Every death festival so far has shown me something utterly startling. Day of the Dead in Mexico made me realise that you don’t have to believe in an afterlife to have a continuing relationship with the dead. When someone dies, the love doesn’t go anywhere and if your culture demands repression, it calcifies. Actions as seemingly small as pouring them a drink, lighting a candle for them, even saying hello – it’s an action for your love’s idle hands, somewhere for your love to go.
Gai Jatra in Nepal taught me that the drowning loneliness that accompanies grief is a liar – the festival involves everyone who’s lost someone that year taking part in a joyful procession with drums and chanting and singing. The visual effect is incredible; it’s impossible to believe that you’re alone in your grief when you’re surrounded by people going through the same thing, who have all come together to help each other through the pain.
The Festa dei Morti in Sicily taught me that we project our fear of death on to children much more overtly than I’d realised. When I was growing up, mention of anyone who’d died was necessarily followed by a sad and awkward silence, which was only broken when someone muttered “very sad” – the subtext being, “you have been violent by mentioning that person’s name and reminding us of our mortality”. This is how I grew up regarding the dead. Over in Sicily, children would wake up on the morning of the Festa to a TREASURE HUNT: candy and presents hidden around the house by their dead relatives who visited in the night, like Santa Claus. When you grow up associating the dead with a treasure hunt and a sugar hit, their name slips easily into conversation without the awkward silence, the implied accusation of psychological violence I grew up with. I am, frankly, blisteringly jealous.
One message is consistent across all the festivals, a message I never got growing up in the west: death is normal. It’s not always a sign that something has gone horribly wrong. It was in the small-print when we were born, and ignoring it until we are bereaved – the highest moment of trauma – is absurd and unhealthy.
KMD: Your book is an exciting hybrid, blending personal experience with research and field work. What does research make possible for you as a storyteller?
EB: My feelings and perspectives are incredibly limited on their own, informed as they are by my culture and upbringing. I don’t think even I could stay interested in death from the perspective of one middle class, straight, white, cis, English woman, even one who spent weeks stalking everyone she knew online to check they hadn’t died. I spent two years reading scientific studies, religious texts, children’s stories, non-fiction, poetry – anything death-related I could get my hands on, not to mention interviewing an entire cast of weird and wonderful characters (some of them, admittedly, more weird than wonderful). One of the most fascinating threads of This Party’s Dead is where I got to investigate the intersection of death and privilege – that, to me, is infinitely more interesting than the story one woman going to death festivals trying to heal from a bereavement. That would just be Eat, Pray, Love with corpses. Instead, my story is weaved through a much bigger story about how our species deals with a unique problem: we’re going to die, and unlike other animals, we know it.
KMD: In addition to your achievements as a nonfiction writer, you also write literary fiction. How does your work with short stories enrich your essays, journalistic prose, and narrative nonfiction?
EB: I love short stories, and I think that when they’re done well, they can be fundamentally similar to narrative nonfiction. I like to end chapters by giving the reader the same flutter you get at the end of a good short story, some sense that something, however small, has been wrapped up, answered, healed, or even ripped to shreds. The challenge with nonfiction is to take true events and bend them into a story arc the brain likes, without fabricating – but unlike in fiction, you have no obligation to make it plausible (and thank goodness because some of the people I’ve interviewed for this book…let’s just say I’ve kept the recordings, because you just wouldn’t believe some of the things they said). Everyone knows fiction need complex characters – but so does nonfiction. Bad nonfiction simply fails to flesh them out. Sadly, you don’t have as much access to interviewees as you do your characters: you don’t get to hear their thoughts or know their deepest motivations. So often – as challenging and nerve-wracking as it can be – the character you have to flesh out is you.
KMD: What else are you working on? What can readers look forward to?
EB: I’m currently on a three-month break between death festivals (the last three are clumped together in August and September) so as well as continuing my work for the Guardian and Medium, I’m turning my attention to writing a series of short stories, all set in London and subtly intertwining in some way. Then later in the year I’ll be able to finish the book and it should be on the shelves hopefully this time next year (though who knows, they might plump for Halloween!)
This Party’s Dead is on sale as I’m writing it, and people who buy it now can also look forward to email updates from me from the death festivals. The final three are in Japan, Indonesia and Madagascar and the final two involve actual corpses, so there should be some fascinating stories – which I will be tweeting as I go.