Death literature

In college I was assigned The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker and was absolutely bewitched. I have read a lot of death literature, death memoirs, How We Die, and A Year of Magical Thinking. One book about a book club with his dying mother. A poet dying, where she says cute things I identify with, and the one by a doctor, that made me cry reading the epilogue by the wife.

Sigrid Nunez has a novel about death, from earth dying, to an elderly neighbor, to being a kind of death doula to her friend. 

I'm feeling more emotionally fragile with the breakup of my marriage, and the stress of quarantine, but I'm reading through Nunez and my library made the book available so I started reading it. I didn't even get halfway in the 2 weeks, but it came around again and I'm going to finish it now that I've identified my resistance to reading it.

What Are You Going Through is the usual clear smooth literate narrative by Nunez. On Netflix it would be called "Slow Burn".

I'm reading the book and I remember that Nunez had worked for Susan Sontag, and that she'd written a book about an affair she'd had with Sontag's son. I look at her list of books, and there's Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. But perhaps her remembering Sontag's death is part of her death novel. I look to find out if Sontag really had an affair with William Faulkner, and I get a review of her journals in the New Yorker. William Faulkner is mentioned but not the affair. I think literary gossip is perhaps not put into print, you hear it at literary cocktail parties. I imagine. I've never been to one.

I've read all the Nunez books online at my library, now I'm going to have to get physical copies.

Anyway, a lovely book, and can quite nicely be added to the death list of books.