Hypertext Magazine asked Erica Buist, author of This Party’s Dead, “So you visited seven festivals for the dead and wrote a book about it. You saw bodies burning on pyres, dressed in new clothes and dancing on the shoulders of their descendants. You even got hit in the head by a corpse. After immersing yourself in all this death, are you… okay?”

I really am.

There is a persistent expectation for women writing memoirs to be revealing, confessional, and at least peripherally relate it all to self-help. Well, my book does start with my fiancé and I finding his father’s corpse after eight days, and does follow me as I descend into agoraphobia, digitally stalking everyone I know to check they haven’t also dropped dead without warning. When I tried to overcome it, I ended up having a panic attack in a supermarket, throwing down a sandwich and sprinting home.

But when I decided to visit seven festivals for the dead, it wasn’t to heal or come to terms with my grief. This Party’s Dead isn’t Eat, Pray, Love with corpses. I swear.

I visited Mexico, Nepal, Sicily, Thailand, Madagascar, Japan and Indonesia because I was interested in how other people deal with death anxiety, because here in the west we are definitely not dealing with it well. We avoid mention of our own mortality or of those we love; the only death we’ll engage with is on TV, news of bombings or shootings or disease – and Hollywood can’t commission enough on the topic of pretty dead girls. Man, Hollywood loves a pretty dead girl. We’ll watch flies buzz around the pale blue flesh of a formerly cute twentysomething as cops place hairs into evidence bags. We don’t even blink anymore at the obligatory shot of the lifeless open eyes, the dirty upturned palms, the bruises around her neck that suggest strangulation. But if you so much as mention the simple, ordinary fact that your dog or grandparents will die one day, you’re apparently “ruining Christmas dinner” (sorry, Mum). Even asking someone their age is a faux pas, presumably because it’s impolite to remind someone they’re going to die. There’s something wrong with us. And I wanted to find out if in places where death and the dead are celebrated, people have a different outlook.

A popular myth is that we’re “more afraid” of death in the west, but it’s not true. We all have the same fear by virtue of being human. But some of us are dealing with it well, and others are dealing with it badly. In Kathmandu, the city has a huge parade for everyone who’s lost someone that year. The loneliness that accompanies grief has a harder time drowning you when you’re surrounded by people dancing to music in the streets, all of whom have been through the same thing. In Japan, the spirits of the dead are said to visit for a week, and are sent off with huge mountainside bonfires. What a perfect outlet for grief, which doesn’t heal like a cut, but comes in waves – every year, you watch them leave again, say goodbye again, confront mortality again. In Magadascar and Indonesia, the corpses are exhumed to join in the party. All of this is a response to the exact same fear: we’re going to die, and we know it. I’m happy I spent so much time in the company of people who responded to it by throwing a party, not a sandwich.

So yes, I’m fine. I’m better. I didn’t mean to heal, but I did.

Erica Buist is a writer, author, journalist – mostly for the Guardian – and Senior Social Media Editor at Tupelo Quarterly. Her first book, a hybrid of memoir and journalism called This Party’s Dead is out in February 2021. Erica’s short fiction has appeared in Liars’ League London, Tupelo Quarterly and Guts Publishing. She has been awarded writing residencies at the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods, Vermont Studio Center, Faberlull (Spain), Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Arte Studio Ginestrelle (Italy). She lives in London and tweets @ericabuist.