Mrs Death Misses Death: Salena Godden

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The Writing It is clear Salena Godden can write. This is my first introduction to her work, and she writes solidly. I have never read any of her poetry so it was great seeing a bit of it included in this book. She writes convincingly so much so, I started feeling sorry for Mrs. Death. It’s the idea of when you’re not speaking your truth, and not saying something you really want to say,” she explains. “When you keep putting something off, you berate yourself and put yourself down for not getting something finished. It’s easy to have a really good idea, it’s difficult to finish something, isn’t it? So to pursue it, and to persist in finishing it, hurt, but it hurt a hell of a lot more giving up.” Listening to this being read by the author on audio took on an entire meaning as it’s read harrowingly. Mrs Death Misses Death is not a normal kind of book. If you come to this expecting a prose story you’ll be a little surprised with what you find here, because it’s more like a series of poems and lyrical text that comes together to tell one story, but in a way that I’ve not really seen any other books do before. The narrative follows Wolf Willeford, a ‘Biracial, Bisexual, Bigender and Bipolar’ writer, who one day just before Christmas sees the perfect writing desk in the window of an antique shop that’s closing down; a desk that they know they need to help them with their writing; and a desk that once belonged to Mrs Death.

A previous chapter “Mrs Death: I know a Lot of Dead People Now” which philosophises that knowledge and recognition of the inevitability of death (not just yours but the death of all your family and friends) is vital for life, is both mirrored and countered in a final prose section “Wolf: The Tower” where Wolf encounters Life who says that living your own life fully for the moment and in the knowledge of the life of all your friends and family is what life is really about.

Caution: This book may cause an existential crisis, writes Béibhinn Breathnach of Salena Godden's debut novel... The most mystical, brilliant, and otherworldly book about death I've read since... high school? Wow, this book speaks about blood memory, time, death and of course life in ways I haven't experienced before. I'll keep saying it, poets who crossover to novels don't play fair! A modern-day Pilgrim’s Progress leavened with caustic wit . . . This is not light-hearted stuff, yet Godden has produced a miraculously light-hearted novel . . . an elegant, occasionally uproarious, danse macabre - Guardian Writing about the death of Prince and the simultaneous public outpouring of grief that usually follows the death of a celebrity, Godden spears the feeling of this particular type of loss, where art is the connective tissue between us and a stranger we felt we knew. Photos from the studio, starting work on the ‘Mrs Death Misses Death’ audio book. Experimenting with her enchantment, her rich, smoky, otherworldly voice, enjoying this part of the creative process.

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. 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. Told in sparse, affecting prose interspersed with poetry, Godden produces a thought-provoking novel that travels across time and place to question the value of life, the experiences of womanhood, and grief in all its forms.’ Speaking of fire, and of the title, Wolf (biracial, nonbinary, and possibly bipolar) is here to narrate only because Mrs Death missed one. Their mum died in a house fire. Wolf should have died that day, too, but heard a voice saying “ Wake up, Wolf … Can you smell smoke?” Were they spared deliberately, or did Mrs Death make a mistake? (After all, we learn that when a patient briefly wakes up on the operating table before dying for good, it’s because Mrs Death’s printer got jammed.)Now, If you told the 1990s me that 2020s me would be standing here today, that she would be thriving and healthy and happy and making the work she wants to make, she would not believe it. She was self doubting and self sabotaging, she was rejected and underestimated, struggling in a world that told her that her story, her voice, her work did not belong and did not matter.

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. She is nobody and she is everybody. She is the homeless person begging for change outside the train station. Mrs Death is the spirit of the ignored and the saint of the betrayed. She is the first woman. Mrs Death is the first mother of all mothers. She is calling to us all now. She is weeping. She is cradling her crumbling world. She is holding this toxic and wounded planet to her cold breast. She is sitting next to you on the bus. She is amongst us. I got it wrong. Mrs Death is not the wife of Death. No. And she is not the mother of Death. No. She is Death, and she gets the final say. 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. One approach Godden used to condense the text was to turn what originally she wrote as essays into shorter poems, such as 'Mrs Death in Holloway Prison' featuring Sarah Reed's story, giving the reader time to pause, and think and to "say her name." This is a broken prose poem which begins: A poet and memoirist, Godden is skilled at creating shapes with her words. She writes without arrogance. There is no pretence and no pretension, and when she gives us a more literary angle of her writing it is with a wink and a grin, with the full knowledge that she is mistress of her own pen. She does not shy away from the uncomfortable, either. If there are details that make the reader twitchy then there is no apology. In this work, she stands with the dead, with Mrs Death.Salena Godden is known for the graphic power of her work and is one of the foremost poets in the UK, as well as an author and singer songwriter. If you can’t possibly choose between the two covers, then one for you and one for a flatmate/partner/cat/snow person seems the only way forward. #mrsdeathmissesdeath #SalenaGodden #ReadCanongate #bookstagram #instabook #indiebookshops #choosebookshops #independentbookshops 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 deb From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Book Lovers and Beach Read comes a sparkling novel that will leave you with the warm, hazy afterglow usually reserved for the best vacations. Rin’s story continues in this acclaimed sequel to The Poppy War—an epic fantasy combining the history of twentieth-century China with a gripping world of gods and monsters.

The author’s depiction of Mrs Death is of a woman who enjoys an evening by the TV with Wolf, a glass of red wine in hand, rather than the traditional scythe. Dreary is simply not her style. The absurd is also employed as a safe space to explore uncomfortable truths about life (and death). The character of the Desk - more specifically Mrs. Death’s desk - communicates its disappointment at the cards it has been dealt by fate. Mrs. Death tells of her work, so we see death through a different lens. She’s not always crazy about the tragedy of death, the horror of death, the details of death. Godden writes of the tragedy and comedy of death. It’s a rumination on death. The novel then unfolds in a series of prose chapters ostensibly narrated by either Wolf or Mrs Death (with one chapter by the Desk) – albeit with the two’s stories coalescing (for example an interview with Mrs Death and a psychiatric seems to morph into Wolf being in hospital) – these being interleaved with copious poetry.

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. One of my absolute favorite characteristics in books is WEIRDNESS. I’m exactly the target audience for experimental storytelling. The premise sounded awesome, but the execution just fell so short. The weirdness felt so surface level. It gave the book this Fake-Deep feel. Godden brings her poetic skills in writing this amusing story, of Mrs. Death unburdening her story to Woof Willeford, a struggling author who buys a magic desk. Through the desk, Mrs. Death takes Woof with her while she explains her story. I listened to the audio narrated by the author herself. She tells her story in a stream-of-conscious format which works well with her poetic skills. Mrs Death has had enough. She is exhausted by her job and now seeks someone to unburden her conscience to. I’m setting this aside at 50%, I’ve been dragging my feet through this book for months, and I just don’t think my enjoyment will change. I’m totally disappointed. I was primed to love this.