Sophie Duffy, "D is for Death"

Sophie Duffy writes about the complications and joys of family life. As a Gen-Xer, she has a particular fascination with the 70s and 80s. Her debut novel The Generation Game (Legend Press, 2011) won both the Yeovil Literary Prize and the Luke Bitmead Bursary. This Holey Life (2012), Bright Stars (2015) and Betsy and Lilibet (2018) were also published by Legend. She has written romcoms under the pen name Lizzie Lovell for Allen and Unwin and ghost-written a nurse’s memoirs. She is RLF writing fellow at the University of Manchester and also runs the Exeter Novel Prize as part of Creative Writing Matters. D is for Death is her first non-fiction book and was published in July 2024 by Hero. A Devonian, she now lives on the Wirral. 

About D is for Death, by Sophie Duffy
D is for Death is a cultural and personal roadmap of death and dying, covering all aspects from accidents and bodies to contagion and ghosts, each letter unveiling a new facet. The result of dealing with cancer during the time of Covid, D is for Death adds to the growing death positive conversation; by dragging death into the open and facing our mortality head on, we can live life more fully. The book encourages the reader to consider the choices for the disposal of your body, to write your funeral plan, to talk about grief and loss, to explore the significance of terror and war, to reflect on the impact of climate change, to ponder the mysteries that defy explanation. Full of stories, information and memoir, D is for Death embraces the one certainty that binds us all – the journey from A-Z.

You can read more about D is for Death on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the book. 

From D is for Death

We are in the NAAFI canteen of Hack Green Secret Nuclear Bunker beneath the green fields of Cheshire. Initially, a bombing decoy site for Crewe railway station, in 1941, it became RAF Hack Green, defending the land between Birmingham and Liverpool. Following WW2, it was converted to a Cold War bunker; in the event of a nuclear attack, Hack Green would be responsible for the territory stretching from Cheshire to Cumbria. No longer secret, the bunker is now open to the public. We have just watched a film loop playing the public information film Protect and Survive, told in the reassuring voice of Patrick Allen how to deal with dead family members: wrap in polythene, tag, bury. 

I am with my partner, Neil, and his twelve-year-old daughter, Ella, eating  ‘wartime tomato soup and bread,’ drinking tea from tin cups. Ella is used to visiting odd places with her stepmother. (Thankfully, she is a stoic child). Neil, who grew up on the Wirral, says they were told at school not to worry, because the second the bomb hit the chemical plants of Runcorn, they’d be eviscerated. I think about my home in Devon. Probably a hideous slow death. I remember the existential threat of annihilation which hung over the childhoods and teenage years of Gen-Xers, seeping into pop culture. ‘Two Tribes’ by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Murakami’s film of Raymond Briggs’s Where the Wind Blows. (Not exactly The Snowman). Now, underground, whilst tucking into carrot cake, Ella recounts how her friend is anxious about a nuclear attack with Putin pushing the button. She is dismissive. I wish I had her presence of mind. Why fret about tomorrow? 

Before we leave, we browse the souvenirs. She chooses a magnet. On the journey home, in the back of the car, Ella holds it like a talisman. As we head onto the Wirral, chemical plants in view, she asks: would my magnet survive a nuclear blast? We swap a look, her dad and me. What should we say? Ella answers her own question. ‘No point worrying. We’ll all be dead.’

 

Will Buckingham, "Hello, Stranger: How We Find Connection in a Disconnected World"

Will Buckingham is a writer originally from the UK, but now often found elsewhere in the world. He has written novels (The Descent of the Lyre, Sixty-Four Chance Pieces: A Book of Changes), children’s books (Lucy and the Rocket Dog, The Snorgh and the Sailor) and nonfiction (Stealing With the Eyes: Imaginings and Incantations in Indonesia and Hello, Stranger: How We Find Connection in a Disconnected World). He was formerly Associate Professor of Writing and Creativity at De Montfort University, and a visiting professor at the Parami Institute, Yangon, Myanmar. He is currently based in Bulgaria, where he co-directs Wind&Bones, a social enterprise exploring the meeting-places of writing, creativity and social change. His website is here.

About Hello, Stranger

When philosopher and traveller Will Buckingham’s partner died, he sought solace in throwing open the door to new people. Now, as we reflect on our experiences of the pandemic and its enforced separations, and as global migration figures ever more prominently in our collective future, Buckingham brings together insights from philosophy, anthropology, history and literature to explore how our traditions of meeting the other can mitigate the issues of our time. Taking in stories of loneliness, exile and friendship from classical times to the modern day, and alighting in adapting communities from Birmingham to Myanmar, Hello, Stranger asks: how do we set aside our instinctive xenophobia – fear of outsiders – and embrace our equally natural philoxenia – love of strangers and newness?

From Hello, Stranger, by Will Buckingham

Today, in hotpot restaurants across the Chinese-speaking world, noisy groups of diners sit around shared, steaming pots of broth, and they drop vegetables, meat and seafood in bubbling liquid. As they do so, they cook up togetherness, that renao (literally: hot and noisy) warmth that is the stuff of life. The hotpot bubbles. The broth thickens. It takes up the flavours of the things the diners drop into it. It becomes thicker, richer, spicier. Fuchsia Dunlop writes, ‘There is something about the heat, the communal atmosphere and the diehard recklessness of eating so many chillies on a sweltering evening that is both hilarious and exhilarating.’ As one of her Chinese friends says to her, in the seethe and swirl of the bubbling liquid, hotpot ‘makes a person forget about their worries and grief.’

Hotpot is not a dish to eat alone: the whole point is that it is shared. With my new colleagues in Chengdu, I got hot and noisy. Clustered round, we fished with our chopsticks in the steaming pot of strange things – congealed blood, lotus roots, young bamboo shoots, unidentifiable animal parts, things plucked from the bottom of the sea. 

Occasionally, I pulled something mysterious and rubbery from the steaming broth and asked, ‘What is this?’ One of my new colleagues – a Kant scholar who carried an image of the Prussian philosopher in her purse, and who occasionally took it out to gaze at him in admiration – reprimanded me for my squeamishness, saying, ‘It is better not to ask. Better just to eat and to see if it is delicious.’ So I did. And it was. 

And at the end of the meal, when I reached into my pocket to pay, my new friends said no. ‘Women qing ke,’ they said. We invite you as a guest. 

I removed my hand from my pocket and thanked them. ‘Bie keqi,’ they said. Don’t take on the airs of a guest.