How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences by
Sue William Silverman
My rating:
5 of 5 stars
Many are haunted and obsessed by their own eventual deaths, but perhaps no one as much as Sue William Silverman. This thematically linked collection of essays charts Silverman’s attempt to confront her fears of that ultimate unknown. Her dread was fomented in part by a sexual assault, hidden for years, that led to an awareness that death and sex are in some ways inextricable, an everyday reality many women know too well. Through gallows humor, vivid realism, and fantastical speculation, How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences explores this fear of death and the author’s desire to survive it. From cruising New Jersey’s industry-blighted landscape in a gold Plymouth to visiting the emergency room for maladies both real and imagined to suffering the stifling strictness of an intractable piano teacher, Silverman guards her memories for the same reason she resurrects archaic words—to use as talismans to ward off the inevitable. Ultimately, Silverman knows there is no way to survive death physically. Still, through language, commemoration, and metaphor, she searches for a sliver of transcendent immortality.
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This is an exceptional essay collection. It really is.
I first came across this book when running Book Party Chat, an event designed to help authors whose recent releases have been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. I interviewed Sue William Silverman, and we had a long chat about this book and her motivations for writing it.
I've long been a fan of memoir, but it's been quite a while since I've read an essay collection, and I was so excited to start. This book is all about death--in many different forms.
We start with an examination of understanding what death could be: "But isn't Death the ultimate Ultima Thule, the final boundary between the known and unknown worlds? What conditions must exist, what to pack in your carry-on, how to prepare to cross that liminal threshold from the State of Being to Non-Being? Better yet: How to escape it altogether? Or is death a great adventure like climbing Mr. Everest that would surely kill me in any event. [...] What is the appearance of the Ultima Thule of Death? Do I find it or does it find me? What does it sound like, taste like? Does death have a voice? Is it pure absence? I might not fear death if I could be alive to experience it."
These questions encourage the readers to think deeply--indeed, what death sounds like and tastes like, isn't something I've particularly thought much about. And the point about how we may not fear death if we "could be alive to experience it" is a fantastic one that raises the role of fear and the unknown in our perceptions of death.
I think it's safe to say that the author is somewhat obsessed by death and what it means. She examines the subject from multiple angles, really delving deep as she processes what it means. And this was a fascinating read, it really was.
Sue William Silverman examines how we can overcome death--in all its many forms--and this largely focuses on preserving our own memories, our record of life. For it is like that overcomes death, and we need to use the power of words and language to breathe life into our memories to allow them to "marinate for eternity": "To survive death you have to believe in magic, language, and memory."
And I love this. As a writer myself, I'm fascinated by the power of words and what language can do. And as a memoir writer as well, I'm particularly interested in how other authors approach writing their memories. HOW TO SURVIVE DEATH is a series of essays, each one showing us a glimpse into the author's life--we're plunged right into her memories in these essays, as we relive specific events with the author. The writing style submerges us in these scenes, and there's a strong feelings of 'being present now' as we read. I think this is because there's so much emotion embedded in the language and the scenes we're being shown; we really feel what Sue William Silverman was feeling at these times. It feels real.
My favourite essay (and this was such a hard thing to pick, because each is so powerful and important and so 'favourite' isn't exactly the right word) is "My Death in the Family." It's opening--"I die at four years old" is just such a powerful line, and I really found this glimpse of a moment in the author's childhood really powerful. Her father is building her a toy--a paper house and dolls--and these are based on their own family. As the author and her father are working on this, Sue feels a sense of disconnection and an almost feeling of fear at her disconnection: "Am I even still here? I pick up the scissors and press the blunt point against my palm. I feel it, but it's a distant ache. As if it's both my palm and not. Maybe it's the palm of the paper girl."
She then goes on to talk of her inexplicable fear of the paper girl, the girl they've crafted from paper that represents her. Sue purposefully makes a rip in the girl's neck, confident that her father will "never notice the small rips and tears in his nonpaper daughter's body". The paper girl with the ripped neck becomes a very apt metaphor as the author then tells readers of the childhood trauma and abuse she experienced, and this sense of disconnection between herself and what she feels--with the introduction of the paper girl as an alternate self--becomes clear as a way of the author processing what is happening: "This paper-like voodoo child is half-dead/half-alive. Her thin shoulder blades feel queasy. She's afraid to glance in the silver, gum-wrapper mirror. She might see only crayon features. Or, worse, no features at all. [...] In the doll's thin, vulnerable body, I see my own thin, vulnerable self."
Identity and the examination of how identity is reborn from the many different types of death is explored a lot in this essay collection, just as the many forms of death are examined.
While the essays in this collection are all drawn from the author's memories, there was one in particular that stood out to me in its examination of memory and how this links to illness and time, and this is "The Safe Side." In this essay, Sue William Silverman talks about bodily sensations and heartbeats, illness, and the reliability of memory. She describes a tip to the ER where a nurse is asking her about her symptoms, and then tells of how "Last night I _think_ a flutter in my heart awakens me" -- already the emphasis on "think" brings in questions of certainty, something which is then examined further as the author contemplates the roles of hallucinations and whether memories can be trusted, both at the time (or the day after she gets these symptoms), and months or even years later when looking back--as the Author's Note at the start of the essay collection tells us that her recollections "shift and change over the years as memories tend to do" and that the events in this book take "place in a compressed time and in non-chronological order, yet I have endeavoured to be accurate in these acts of recollection". I found this so enlightening, using this Author's Note and her ideas on recollection and memory in "The Safe Side" to think about how memories change, as it conjures questions of accuracy and reliability in any memoir at all, for a genre that is all about accuracy and telling a truth.
And this essay feels incredibly honest (well, each essay does). But "The Safe Side" ends with the author being told her heart rate is healthy and that she didn't have a heart attack. "_Some people imagine things_, the doctor said," and the author realises she can't explain the physical sensations she had. She knows she did not dream them, they weren't hallucinations, but medical science is unable to objectively confirm their presence. Therefore, she's only able to rely on her memories of the symptoms she's had, and this then encourages her to think about how death is her obsession and that she imagines death all the time. Yet this essay also spoke to me in terms of the way women are often treated by doctors too--would the doctor have said that some people imagine things, if it had been a man who was presenting with these symptoms that the tests couldn't confirm? I'm inclined to think not.
The writing style of this collection as a whole is wonderfully engaging, while of course being beautifully written. There are so many gems in this book, so many lines that just made me pause and think. As I read it, I found myself underlining so many sentences (in pencil, of course!). This is a book that really makes you think, and it's one that I don't think can be read solidly cover-to-cover in one go, simply because of how rich these essays are. Each requires its own thinking time for us to process and understand what the author is showing us, and what our thoughts in response are.
Overall, this is an incredibly powerful essay collection.
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