Death and Other Holidays

by Marci Vogel

Overview

Winner of the inaugural MIAMI BOOK FAIR/DE GROOT PRIZE for Best Novella

The fiction debut of a distinctive new American voice

Life is coming fast at  twenty-something April. All the heavy stuff of adulthood—including the death of a loved one—seems to have happened to her all at once, leaving her reeling, and challenging her wit and grit in ways she never imagined. In a stirring portrait told in keenly etched scenes, Death and Other Holidays follows April over the course of a year, with a candid insight that’s tender, playful, and sparkles with originality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781612197371
Publisher:	Melville House Publishing
Publication date:	11/13/2018
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
File size:	690 KB

About the Author

Marci Vogel is an award-winning writer, translator and poet. She is the author of the
poetry collection At the Border of Wilshire & Nobody. She lives in Los Angeles.

Death & Other Holidays is her fiction debut, and won the inaugural Miami Book Fair/ de Groot Prize, the only American literary award honoring the novella.

Read an Excerpt

Snap, Death and Other Holidays
Snap

I FOUND THIS OLD CAMERA when we were clearing out Wilson’s dresser drawers, and I’m going to start taking pictures. Libby says I’m going to drive her crazy with all the snap, snap, snapping every two seconds, but I read about this woman in the newspaper. She said she’s afraid of losing her mind, her memory, of being erased, so every day she takes a photograph of something, and that way she won’t lose her life when the time comes. I thought it was a good idea.

Green, Death and Other Holidays
Green

THEY SAY WINTER is the season of death, but anyone I’ve ever known who’s died, they died in the spring. They say you’re supposed to get this miraculous sense of renewal and promise, but it never happens that way, either. Libby says it’s because we live in Los Angeles, and our seasonal clocks are set by new lipstick colors, but I don’t think that’s it. Maybe the changes aren’t as obvious as in colder climates, but spring is spring, and it always feels kind of precarious. I mean, there’s so much upheaval, all those blossoms forcing their way out of winter branches, tiny sprouts trying to break through the dirt. The whole business just seems a colossal effort, and if you don’t have a pretty good reason for it, well, I guess I can understand why the entire scheme might not be worth another round.

Consider, for example, my father. He couldn’t stand it, not one more spring. He hanged himself the year I turned sixteen. He left me his Datsun B210 hatchback, and it was months before I learned to operate the clutch without stalling. And my mother’s mother, she held on all winter after a stroke. Halfway through March, she had enough. She made sure my mother knew how to cook a decent holiday brisket, then died in her sleep.

And now Wilson, my mother’s second husband, Wilson, he died last week. I thought maybe he’d live forever, and maybe he would’ve if we had insisted on staying past visiting hours. He was so polite, he’d never die with us there. My mother called early Sunday, though, told me to meet her by the nurses’ station. She took down all the get-well cards, tossed the dried-up flowers, his green striped pajamas, the slippers I got him last Father’s Day. It was all done.

“Hey there, beauty, baby girl,” he’d said. “Wilson’s life is over now, yours is just beginning.” He was pumped full of morphine and he wrote me this note: Start, go.

It was spring, and I knew he was right. I just didn’t feel up to it was all.

Heartbreak, Death and Other Holidays
Heartbreak

IT WAS THE FIRST new dress that Wilson wouldn’t see, black with tiny white polka dots. “My husband died yesterday,” my mother told the saleswoman as she rang up our purchase.

The first time my mother and Wilson saw each other was in that elegant Hollywood apartment, the one he shared with Leo Fine. They tell me I was busy crawling up the stairs one New Year’s Eve when my mother shouted to Wilson, who was walking down, “Don’t step on my baby!”

I was seven when they got married.

I never asked what happened in between.

Every spring, my mother and I would go shopping, we’d come home and take turns modeling new clothes, hats, shoes. My mother liked the skirts that twirled, she’d spin around, and Wilson would clap his hands and say, “Outta my mind over it! Best skirt in the world!” He’d have the Lakers on TV with the volume turned off, and if they missed a shot while we were changing in the next room, I’d know because I could hear his voice.

“Heartbreak,” he’d say to no one in particular.

Editorial Reviews

09/10/2018
This uneven novel by poet Vogel (At the Border of Wilshire & Nobody) follows the life of April, a thoughtful young woman bemused by the world around her, as she chronicles her days over a year’s time. Mourning the loss of her mother’s second-husband, Wilson, she also grapples with her own father’s suicide. She reminisces about quasi-Jewish family gatherings, muses on advice given to her by her friend Libby, and falls for Libby’s fiance’s cousin Victor. She reads obituaries, is confused by the advice of a clairvoyant, and witnesses a baby bird as it’s struck by a clueless driver, page by page revealing the melancholy lens with which she views the world. The chapters, some less than half a page long, are elegiac, logging April’s responses to the lovely and the sad. Most everything is metaphor, from anchor screws to the beetles that arrive every summer—“an infestation of idiocy.” All these vignettes are meant to accrue meaning and result in something weighty, and for some readers they will. But for others, Vogel’s bijou collection of moments fails to add up. Nevertheless, the book succeeds in creating a portrait—if not an indictment—of the anxious times in which it was written. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"Hypnotic and elegant... It's a stunning meditation on loss, love, and our powerlessness in the face of time — for better or worse, life carries on." —BUZZFEED 

"[A] beautiful book...The prose is stunning..a moving and graceful novella of overcoming sorrow." —*starred* KIRKUS REVIEWS

“Short but mighty… a remarkable confluence of palpable mood, a capricious and shifting tone, and wise character studies… An original and affecting tour of family, the calendar, and the days that bind us to both.” —BOOKLIST 

"A stirring portrait told in keenly-sketched scenes... with candid insight that is tender, playful and sparkles with originality."—BOOK RIOT

"Death and Other Holidays brilliantly balances humor and anger, sorrow and beauty. Vogel's subjects may be grief and death, but her writing reflects life as we live it, life with its many intricate, unnoticed balances."—NPR

“A tour de force… Composed of gorgeous vignettes...Death and Other Holidays is raw, honest, and darkly humorous. Vogel’s tight prose reads like something of a diary by its immediacy, capturing the inner workings of April’s mind, and speaks to the aching young adult in all of us.” —ARKANSAS INTERNATIONAL

“Vogel is a master at planting improbable seeds — the ashes of a loved one; fertile words like Petaluma — and growing them into a strange and magnificent garden.” —Rivka Galchen, author of American Innovations

“Beautifully conceived and beautifully executed.  Marci Vogel is an artist in complete control of her materials.” —Percival Everett, author of So Much Blue   

“Vogel builds, with lightness and clear eyes, a vibrant world of family, love, and loss. Skillful and charming ... all made by a voice that trembles between boldness and vulnerability.” —Aimee Bender, author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

"Wryly appealing and quietly moving... as well as deftly constructed." —Jim Shepard, author of The Book of Aron and judge of the Miami Book Fair/de Groot Prize

"A gently humorous book tinged with melancholy... [an] entertaining read." —THE LONDON MAGAZINE

"One of Emma Robert's favorites of the year. The perfect book for a darkly funny friend."  —BELLETRIST's 2018 Gift Guide

“Poignant and affecting… It’s the sort of prose that may make you cry but over its lyrical beauty and spot-on turns of phrase.”—FULL STOP

From the Publisher

★ 2018-08-21

A year in the life of a woman grieving for her stepfather.

The narrator of this beautiful book is a 27-year-old woman named April, a curatorial assistant in California. The story starts in the spring, in the days after April's beloved stepfather, Wilson, has died. This is the second of her fathers to have died: The first killed himself when she was 16. In the months of April's mourning, she floats along, almost dissociative. She has short relationships with unsuitable men: Crash Man, who would always fall asleep while driving; Leaf Man, who grows marijuana plants in his spare bedroom closet; Math Man, who is a foot and a half taller than she is; Critic Man, who hates the layout of her apartment. Finally, in the fall, April falls for her best friend's husband's cousin, Victor, who himself suffers from depression—"the serious kind"—and her life begins to take shape once more. Vogel (At the Border of Wilshire & Nobody, 2015) captures with acute accuracy the drifting sadness that lingers in the months after the death of a loved one—the way little moments serve as reminders and how every task feels just a little bit more difficult. The novella is broken up by season and then into brief chapters, as if to mirror the disjointed, distracted experience of trying to live after the people you love are dead. The prose is stunning: never overwrought for so intense a subject, flowing yet specific, quiet and lovely. In reference to the lists April makes to keep her life on track, she writes: "Life doesn't rest, though. It's always slipping into the future, right when I was all caught up. It's always bringing me back into the thick of it, and I don't want to be in the thick of it. I want everything done."

A moving and graceful novella of overcoming sorrow.

Kirkus Reviews