Hello Team CCC! I’m so excited to tell you about my brand new novel, PITY PARTY, which will be published by Sphere/Little, Brown this July! It’s a romantic comedy about grief. It’s a satire about trying to be a Good Person in the twenty first century, and a celebration of allowing yourself to feel hope, tenderness and joy.
I’m absolutely thrilled with the early quotes and responses - especially from some of my favourite Substackers! Thank you
for saying PITY PARTY is ‘Thought-provoking, charming, cathartic and hilariously vivid.’ And thank you for saying PITY PARTY is ‘deeply moving and very funny - I loved it.’ I really hope you agree!
I’m so excited to share this exclusive extract with you. I really hope you enjoy it…
Ben’s funeral happened on a Wednesday. As I stood in church, between his mother and my best friend, trying hard to think sad thoughts, all my brain could manage was this really feels more like a Friday. I kept drifting off, listing my weekend chores – thinking about sorting the bed linen and laundry, and wondering whether I should go for a run in the morning – before remembering when it was, and where I was. Get it together, Katherine. You’re paying seventy quid a year for the Headspace app, and you can’t stay focused during an actual funeral. What’s wrong with you? It was the saddest occasion imaginable. My brain knew that. But the rest of me wouldn’t play along. Why were we doing this so quickly? Grief came in stages; this was well documented. It seemed all wrong to bury Ben during the shock/denial bit. In six months, I’d be ready to cry my eyes out. Now, I felt as though I was at a very dull pantomime. Every time the vicar referred to Ben in the past tense, we should have been on our feet, bellowing, ‘OH NO HE ISN’T!’
The vicar coughed, and I caught his eye and smiled. It’s OK, I wanted to tell him. This is a very dusty church. Coughing is an occupational hazard. I felt my own cough building at the back of my throat. What funerals needed was a dedicated coughing section. A little pen where we could all sit and pay our respects, while choking quietly. And when I thought about it, ‘paying your respects’ was such a weird expression. It made grief sound like an overdue library fine. I didn’t know how to apply it to Ben. In fact, other than the guest list, nothing about this funeral seemed to have anything to do with Ben.
‘Ben loved sports. But he also loved spending time with his family, and having a laugh with his friends …’ said the vicar. The unironic use of the phrase ‘having a laugh’ should automatically place you on some kind of register – alongside ‘kiddies’, ‘nom nom nom’ and ‘what about yourself?’
‘He was a beloved colleague, and he liked to unwind at the end of the day with a glass of wine …’ I knew that Constance had provided the vicar with a long, detailed essay about exactly who Ben was, as a son and as a person. And it appeared that the vicar had chosen to ignore the essay and read aloud from his own Tinder profile.
I snorted, and Annabel must have thought I was weeping, because she took my hand in hers and squeezed it. Unfortunately, her hand was full of wet tissue. I gulped, not because I was choking back tears, but because I was trying not to think about the fact that I was now covered in Annabel’s cold snot.
The dust motes drifted, pale gold in the winter sun. The vicar was saying something about Ben’s kindness to animals, and his beloved pet rabbit, Buster. Who was Buster? I couldn’t remember Ben ever mentioning a rabbit. Was Ben an animal lover? I suppose he loved to eat them.
Feel sad, I told myself. You’re supposed to be devastated. But it was impossible to focus on Ben, because he just wasn’t there. It felt as though we were all waiting for him to arrive.
‘And now, Benjamin James Ralph Attwell,’ said the vicar. ‘May you rest in peace. Amen.’
Constance sighed, and it was my turn to reach for her hand, warm, in a soft black leather glove. I tried to force my face into an expression of sorrow – knowing the best I could manage was my own version of upside-down mouth emoji – and looked at her. If I couldn’t locate the right sort of sadness at this moment in time, I could be sad for Constance. Her lovely little boy, her daredevil, her darling was up there, and we were here. It was tragic. It was mad. My first tear gathered and rolled as she muttered, ‘I told that idiot a thousand times. It’s pronounced Rafe.’
The tear evaporated. It felt more like a sitcom than a funeral. Any minute, Ben would turn up at the door, covered in seaweed, saying, ‘Well, this is embarrassing! I fell in the drink and came to on the back of a milk float in the Isle of Wight. I don’t know which poor sod is in that box, but it’s not me.’
I could see him, in his shorts and his hat, holding an almost full box of Peroni. ‘What?’ he’d say. ‘The shop was on the way! It took five minutes! Do you want one?’
Then he’d say, ‘What are you all doing in church? I never went to church! In fact, the last time was …’
‘Our wedding,’ I’d finish. ‘Same people, same venue. No gazebo this time, sorry. No vodka luge.’
As a wife, I’d failed Ben in so many ways, but this was the last straw. He’d really wanted a vodka luge at his funeral. I’d only just remembered, and now it was too late.
Because when your healthy, happy young husband says something like that, you laugh. You try, and fail, to imagine the two of you in your seventies, eighties, nineties. You can’t begin to imagine the reality of living and ageing. You can’t comprehend the evolution of your marriage. I never pictured Ben’s funeral because I was distracted dreaming of the children we’d have, the homes we’d live in, the places we’d explore. I could still see the French farmhouse we’d retire to. I could smell the bunches of dried lavender, tied up and gathered into glass vases. I could feel the warm terracotta tiles beneath my bare feet. That place, and those feelings, seemed much more real to me than this church, and Ben’s coffin on the altar.
I couldn’t remember saying or even hearing the words ‘till death us do part’ on our wedding day. Even though in later moments, I sometimes felt trapped and tested by their meaning. I remember thinking that although marriage was supposed to be sacred, and serious, it was so much fun. Most of the time. And I made a promise. Technically, Ben did not break his. He did what he said he would do. He stayed married to me until he fell out of his boat and drowned.
Constance chose the last hymn. We said goodbye to Ben while bellowing ‘For those in peril on the sea.’ She gripped my hand tightly, and before the end of the first verse, she buried her head on my shoulder. ‘What was I thinking?’ she said, sobbing. ‘What was I thinking? He’ll never be in peril on the sea again.’ She was using her ‘outdoor voice’. ‘This song doesn’t work!’ she called out. ‘This is a shit hymn!’
Without looking around, I could tell that people were staring.
Straight away, Annabel swivelled, trapping us under her long black coat in something between a bear hug and a headlock. Constance almost toppled, and pushed against me, to steady herself. The three of us started to sway.
‘FUCK THIS SONG,’ shouted Constance, from under the coat.
‘It’s so sad, so very sad,’ said Annabel, noisily, through tears. ‘So SAD,’ she said, again, drowning out Constance, who was trying to scream obscenities at the vicar. Although it was hard to tell who each noise was coming from. The three of us had formed a solid mass, we were a triumvirate of weeping women, renting our garments and crying over the same man. We must have looked like some kind of Old Testament monster. Or a public demonstration of how to fail the Bechdel test.
Concealed by the coat and under the cover of darkness, I could cry for Ben, and I could cry for me. I felt sick. I growled, I sang, I tried to scream the final ‘sea’. But everything got stuck. Everything felt tight, and hot, and itchy and trapped within me. In approximately 120 seconds I’d have to get out from under Annabel’s coat. I’d have to stand by the door, and smile sadly, and think of something nice to say to the vicar, and shake everyone’s hands, and make space for their sadness. When I hadn’t been able to begin to find room for mine.
The wake was almost festive, all warm alcohol and flaky pastry and ‘Do you remember …’ Ben’s brother Sam was discovered video conferencing with Dubai on the toilet – the telling off from Constance was so evocative of an Atwell family Christmas that I had a brief craving for brandy butter. There was much laughter, followed by panicked apologies. Everyone kept telling me they were sorry, everyone kept reminding me that it was ‘OK’ to ‘feel sad’. After a while, the word ‘tragic’ was used so frequently that it lost all meaning. ‘Tragic’ became the name of a town in Cornwall, or a new kind of cryptocurrency scam. It didn’t sound permanent enough for me to take it seriously. How could any of it be permanent, when I was so certain that my favourite face was about to appear at the door, and I’d hear their voice saying my name?
Of course Ben didn’t show up. Funerals weren’t really his vibe. And I’d forgotten the vodka luge.
I’d LOVE to invite you to help me get this Pity Party started. If you’re able to pre-order, you can get the book from Amazon, Waterstones, Bookshop.org - or, if you ask your local independent bookshop to order a copy for you, I’ll send you a signed, personalised book plate. (It’s also available in ebook and audiobook. I’m SO excited about the narrator, and I’ll be able to reveal who is reading soon!) Also, I’d be so grateful if you could support me by spreading the word and inviting your reading friends to the Pity Party!
Thank you so much for reading. I can’t wait to share more with you.
Love
Daisy x
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