Mrs Death Misses Death: Salena Godden

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A chapter “Mrs Death: You Could be Heroes” starts with mourning the death of inspirational heroes like Cohen, Bowie and Prince before arguing that true heroes are activists, volunteers, protesters, health service workers, campaigners for “libraries, museums, galleries, independent bookshops … beautiful places where thinkers and writers and artists [can] meet and share work” Mrs Death Misses Death is unlike any other book I’ve ever read. It begins with humorous disclaimers of what the book is not, warning the reader against any expectations, before throwing us into verse and diary entries. Throughout the work, writer Salena Godden mixes poetry, prose and song while managing to keep the book cohesive. Brilliant, powerful, unique, this book is exhausting to read and yet beautiful to experience. I will be shouting from my window to anyone who can hear me; Mrs Death Misses Death is a masterpiece of modern literature. While I didn’t absolutely love it, I know there are others who may enjoy it. I think one thing that really stood out for me was Mrs. Death saying,

Told in a laconic, compelling interior monologue, Weather follows the wide-ranging concerns of its librarian protagonist, Lizzie, from the quotidian – a painful knee, her son’s academic progress at school – to the profound – the election of Trump and a looming climate change disaster. Lizzie’s former university professor is now the popular host of an apocalyptic podcast, and Lizzie agrees to answer her conspiracy-filled mail from listeners. Written in deft, compact paragraphs, Offill’s novel balances insight with humour and a timely, ambient sense of anxiety. So as it might seem obvious, I was expecting fantasy but don't let the premise fool you, this book is full of surprises, twists, and turns. It is also an interesting combination of fiction and poetry. Mrs. Death wants to unburden her collected stories to relieve her conscious so she befriends an author named Wolf Wilfred and convinces him to write her memoir. The two become the oddest of friends but rely on each other for support. The Premise: I can say I have never read a premise like this. Death herself gets someone to write a memoir about her life. INJECT THIS IN MY VEINS! I mean seriously, how utterly original is this premise.A family of monkeys feel loss when they lose a member of their group. The killing of Harambe! Why did they kill Harambe? Why don’t we respect and save the animals, Mrs Death? What will we do when the last elephants are extinct, Mrs Death? Who will save the turtles and the coral reefs and the rainforests? Godden has created a meditation on the sheer amount of wasted life we are accustomed to accepting as part of the cost of living, the avoidable tragedies that are the byproduct of extractive capitalism. Just as resolutely as Godden writes about how death is inevitable, she underlines again and again that so many deaths are preventable and that these tragedies need not be repeated. Nut until we find another way to live, they will. Listening to this being read by the author on audio took on an entire meaning as it’s read harrowingly. The novel is written in a hybrid form including poems, letters, diary entries, playscript-style dialogues, a transcript of Mrs Death undergoing psychiatric investigation and even a chapter narrated by a desk, found by Wolf in an antique shop, a desk that provides Wolf access to Mrs Death's stories. Salena Godden FRSL is an award-winning author, poet and broadcaster of Jamaican-mixed heritage based in London. Her debut novel Mrs Death Misses Death won the Indie Book Award for Fiction and the People’s Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the British Book Awards and the Gordon Burn Prize. Film and TV rights for M rs Death Misses Death have been optioned by Idris Elba’s production company Green Door Pictures. Godden has been shortlisted for the 4thWrite short story prize and the Ted Hughes Prize. Her work has been widely anthologised and broadcast on radio, TV and film. Her poem Pessimism is for Lightweights is on permanent display at the People’s History Museum, Manchester. She was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.

Godden strikes the perfect balance between humour and effective insights into grief, trauma, living, and dying. A reader may tear up one moment and laugh the next, with levity never too far around the corner. Mrs Death herself is reluctant to allow her memoir to be transformed into a bleak work, preferring laughter and cheerfulness. I just— it feels so juvenile to me. This is the kind of unpolished, stream of consciousness poetry you scribble in your teenage math journal while blasting Fall Out Boy. Mrs Death Misses Death may on the surface be a book about loss and endings but it is also a brave and funny view of living, and the space between the two. There is life here, and humour, and a challenging viewpoint. The book is filled with strong female and non-binary characters, grappling with the sheer exhaustion of holding their shit together and coping with the shape of the world. Oh, I have been travelling. I time travel. I am a death tourist. I am witness. I am permitted. I can see every end, I go everywhere that Mrs Death goes and the places only Mrs Death can go when I am here and when I listen to The Desk.” Taboo-busting poet Salena Godden talks to the Guardian about her debut novel Mrs Death Misses Death, missing performing and why Brits struggle to speak about her novel’s all too timely subject.

The voice of the furniture allows for these same insights into the pain of living to be developed whilst maintaining the light tone which eases the discomfort of truth. Mrs Death Misses Death should not, however, be dismissed as simply a darkly humorous book. Godden’s observations on mourning are particularly potent as she derives meaning from the mundane, from the objects we choose to keep to the way we might be innocently ‘ordinary’ in our unawareness of how our worlds will irrevocably change. Dark at times – with compelling stories about miscarriages of justice, murder and racial oppression – it is nonetheless celebratory and life-affirming, aglow with love, fortitude and compassion - Daily Mail Godden does not leave her reader dismayed as she ultimately concludes that living is a ‘glorious mess’ and knowing that we are alive should make us live as even better people. Mrs Death Misses Death is an irresistible novel which speaks equally to the act of living as it does to the inevitability of dying. One which manages to simultaneously deal with perhaps the oldest theme of all (death) and yet one that is more topical than ever in the COVID era

Prose and poetry combine in short chapters to share both fictional and real tragic deaths across history and include letters, psychiatry transcripts, and diary entries to expose the horrors of life and death.By the time Wolf reveals “But what if this passion and fury and all this writing were always just the ramblings of an imbalanced mind? What if everything I ever wrote and created was just my mania talking? What is real and what are just feelings? And which are real feelings or just hormones or chemicals in your body?” readers might well be skimming… Mrs Death Misses Death: This is about you and me and us. This is her story, the story, the story of the life and the time of the death of us. This is the life of life and the time of time. For what a time it is and what a time it was and what a time it will be. The Dance of Time and Life and Death, the hours and the breath, the sky and space. The last big sleep. All your fears are here, all your fears are inside here. A rhythmic and powerful poetic meditation on death, life and love and the hidden mysteries of the universe; both playful and sombre, hilarious and human NIKESH SHUKLA Nearly 4.5) Grief Is the Thing with Feathers meets Girl, Woman, Other would be my marketing shorthand for this one. Poet Salena Godden’s debut novel is a fresh and fizzing work, passionate about exposing injustice but also about celebrating simple joys, and in the end it’s wholly life-affirming despite a narrative stuffed full of deaths real and imagined. As someone who went to secondary school and sixth form college in Sussex but was unable to make it to university this is such a wonderful honour. Thank you to all at West Dean and Sussex University. Thanks also to my brother Gus and partner Richard who were there too . I send congratulations to my fellow Fellows: Sue Timney, Joanna Moorhead and Alexandria Dauley and congratulations also to all the amazing graduate students I met and chatted with that day.

Salena Godden appears at The Fountain's Evening of Quarantine Dreaming , 25 Feb, 9pm, part of Paisley Book FestivalWolf's writing is often a bit repetitive and it feels like the author gets so fascinated and hooked by a certain idea that he needs to explore it to the fullest. There are many quotable parts in the book overall and Wolf shares a lot of thought-provoking ideas like when he explains to us how our society often refers to higher powers as male, but that Death is certainly female. I wish this book wasn't trying to be so clever, it only worsens the blow when you find out it really isn't. It felt hollow and distracted the whole way through - dancing limply at the peripheries of any actual message or depth.