Grief is the Family Business
It’s rare to read about death as a sensual experience. For the people who lose loved ones to this grim specter, death is brutal, cruel, obtrusive. For the dying, death can be any number of things: welcome, painful, frightening. Untimely, or unjust. Sensuality has to do with the commingling of physicality and pleasure, and death is rarely posited as a pleasurable event.
But there are sensualists out there who write about the physicality of death and dying with enormous pleasure—which isn’t to say that they are misanthropes, but rather they’re able to break through mortuary taboos to consider the psychosomatic experiences of living people who think about the dead. Nuri McBride is one such thinker—a popular academic who specializes in the relationship between death and scent, lecturing frequently on aromatic death rituals and the balance of the putrid and the divine. The Australian writer and sculptor Ella Baxter is another. As an artist, she fashions intricate death shrouds from antique linen and silk inspired by NASA images of starbirths and exhibits site-specific, ephemeral cocoons throughout Victoria. As a writer, her debut novel New Animal also interrogates death through the lens of physicality: the narrator, Amelia Aurelia, is a flailing almost-thirty-year-old working as a cosmetic mortician at her family’s mortuary business. The death of Amelia’s beloved mother triggers her fight or flight response—she chooses the latter, seeking solace in Tasmania’s BDSM scene. Watching Amelia interrogate her grief through the vehicle of sexual release and experimentation made a lot of sense to me. After all, aside from birth, death and sex are some of the most profound physical experiences available to humans.
The heat and humor that crackles throughout this exceptional debut is on full view in this excerpt, which I hope you’ll enjoy in all its decadence, its morbidity, and its celebration of the human will to not just live, but feel alive.
– Courtney MaumAuthor of The Year of the Horses
