What do you think?
Rate this book
Death and the After Parties
Joanne Hichens lost first her mother, then, in quick succession, her husband, her father and her mother-in-law – two deaths anticipated, two coming as the worst kind of shock. In this memoir of grief and recovery, she writes with honesty and humour of death, our ‘constant companion’, and the stumbling journey through the country of grief. By turns searing and sparkling, her account gives compelling insight into the losses that stalk us all, while also celebrating the mainstays of life – friendship, family, and the memories of those we love and lose.
- GenresMemoir
Paperback
First published November 2, 2020
11 people are currently reading
76 people want to read
About the author
Joanne Hichens
15 books28 followersI live in a seaside suburb of Cape Town called Muizenberg and swim most early mornings in the sea. It’s wonderfully refreshing and helps me to get ready for the day ahead. And of course I love reading – mostly crime and thriller fiction. I’ve read all sorts of crime fiction, from Agatha Christie when I was young, to the more contemporary hard-boiled authors like Elmore Leonard and Bill James. (And of course I scoff chocolates when I’m reading, which could be considered a hobby!)
When it comes to novels for young people, I’m a fan of Mallory Blackman and Stephenie Meyer – both spin a fantastic yarn!
I had always wanted to write, and was lucky enough to get onto a creative writing Masters programme at the University of Cape Town about eight years ago. I don’t believe one needs a degree to write, but committing to the course really threw me into the deep end, as I had no choice but to deliver a novel by the end of my two years part time study. That novel is now in my bottom drawer – I suspect a good number of first novels are lurking in various writer’s drawers! – but I’d love to get it out and rewrite it. I’m not sure why I wanted to write. I just had this overwhelming desire to write a book, and finally tried my hand at it, only to discover writing is a bit of an addiction – I want to do more!
When it comes to novels for young people, I’m a fan of Mallory Blackman and Stephenie Meyer – both spin a fantastic yarn!
I had always wanted to write, and was lucky enough to get onto a creative writing Masters programme at the University of Cape Town about eight years ago. I don’t believe one needs a degree to write, but committing to the course really threw me into the deep end, as I had no choice but to deliver a novel by the end of my two years part time study. That novel is now in my bottom drawer – I suspect a good number of first novels are lurking in various writer’s drawers! – but I’d love to get it out and rewrite it. I’m not sure why I wanted to write. I just had this overwhelming desire to write a book, and finally tried my hand at it, only to discover writing is a bit of an addiction – I want to do more!
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
November 27, 2020
I don't know if I can write a more accurate review of the writing in this memoir than the author herself has written, based on an encounter with her therapist. This appears on page 170 of Death and the After Parties, by Joanne Hichens:
'Face it. Your emotional intensity might scare some. You mourn deeply. The emotional intensity with which you meet others is incredibly rare. You write with sincerity and compassion. You elicit a tremendous response, you evoke feeling in others.'
I have read this quickly and with a lot of tears. Moving, poignant, insightful, and heartbreakingly true to life. And to death.
'Face it. Your emotional intensity might scare some. You mourn deeply. The emotional intensity with which you meet others is incredibly rare. You write with sincerity and compassion. You elicit a tremendous response, you evoke feeling in others.'
I have read this quickly and with a lot of tears. Moving, poignant, insightful, and heartbreakingly true to life. And to death.
January 8, 2021
So often we are afraid to read books about death, dying and loss because of our own various life experiences. It might hurt too much. Or perhaps we haven’t lost a significant other yet and think that it might be of little consequence to read such a story. When I first read Joanne Hichens manuscript I was intrigued because I knew of her as an accomplished author, but soon I was absorbed in her personal story. Loss, and understanding and processing loss is always relevant because life and living is a series of losses. It is for this reason that this book resonates so. It’s also beautifully told. And at times very funny.
Highly recommended.
Highly recommended.
February 15, 2021
Two weeks into lockdown, my Dad took ill. A month later, he was dead. In the months that followed, I spiralled into a dark pit of nothingness. Consumed by loss, I journeyed into the underworld, my only solace being stories about death. This is how I came across Joanne Hichen’s Death and the After Parties – a story about what happens when the matrix shifts – when we lose someone we love and we’re broken beyond repair.
Hichens writes, ‘How do we keep in mind how fast time diminishes for us, that the years left become a smaller and smaller percentage of time compared to what we have already lived?’
This is at the heart of the book – the fact that time is a narrow bandwidth. We live. We love. We lose loved ones.
Hichens tells her story in a register that has depth in its insight, in a way that glistens with humour. She tells how her mother took ill with cancer in 2010 and passed away shortly after. Four years later, her husband, Robert, woke up one morning thinking that he had indigestion. Hichens googled his symptoms and insisted on taking him to hospital. They drove to Constantiaberg Mediclinic. Her husband thought that it was unnecessary. At the hospital, Hichens dropped him at the entrance and went to park the car. By the time she got to the waiting room and was standing around reading the notices on the wall, her husband had had a fatal heart attack. Still in the throes of trying to process his death, her Dad became terminally ill four months later. It is the magnitude of this collective loss that drove the book.
‘I would write haphazard diaries, and writing about death became part of it,’ she says. ‘If you are writing every day, your body is in a habit and this did not stop for me after my husband died. I found it comforting.’
But Death and the After Parties did not start out as a memoir on grief. Initially, Hichens was working on a PhD on loss in the city.
‘I wanted to explore Cape Town as a damaged place. So many people here have experienced loss in so many ways – the loss of dignity, land and ownership,’ says Hichens.
When her own loss became so palpable, the narrative shifted shape into something more personal - interweaving moments of personal loss with a reflection on a broader, societal loss. And this is part of the magic of the book - like a blurred picture where the axles slowly come into focus, we see Cape Town in its complexity - its beauty interwoven with its torment. We catch glimpses into its layered politics and socio-economic issues, the discrepancy between the haves and the have-nots, the violence and poverty. The theme of loss in the city entwines with Hichens’s personal loss, the two layers of the story dovetailing each other in a poignant symbiosis.
Death and the After Parties is a story about how we cope when a loved one dies. But it’s so much more than that. On the one hand, it exposes the rawness of the day-to day moments. Confronting the artefacts of the dead – their clothes, toothbrushes, the books they loved.
‘I’d see my husband’s things and it would hit with unbearable clarity that I would never see him again,’ Hichens says. ‘Through my tears, I’d write, where are you?’
But Death and the After Parties also takes a step beyond the mourning of a person – it becomes a portal into mourning something bigger and far less tangible – the loss of a family unit, of a sense of belonging to something, the loss of a childhood, the history of who we once were. This is beautifully expressed when Hichens writes about her Dad’s furniture, artwork and other belongings going on sale. The ‘textured backdrop’ of her parents’ lives are lined up and dispatched. This ‘undoing of a collection’, with reference to Edmund De Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes, becomes a metaphor for the disintegration of things that once were whole. It’s the search for the moments in time, before the ‘undoing,’ that propels the memoir.
‘After my Dad died, I started having more vivid memories of my childhood, I found myself pulled into that remembered experience and had to write to it,’ says Hichens.
Hichens takes us on a trip of her childhood as a daughter to a diplomat father, travelling the world. It is the time of the darkest moments in apartheid history, the student protests in Soweto in 1976, the State of the Emergency in the eighties. Hichens brings all of this under her lens, with razor sharp honesty. She writes about her father’s official car being pelted with tomatoes in New Zealand, how his face is put on a poster with the words, ‘Wanted for crimes against humanity.’
‘In writing the book, I was able to look at how deeply damaged I was by my past, how the burden of being on the wrong side distorted my sense of self-worth,’ says Hichens.
This sense of how we are shaped and moulded by our past, how we carry it into our future and how we stare at its ghost when we lose a loved one, is a recurring theme in the book. The past leaves an indelible mark. We are compelled to put it under the microscope when someone close to us dies.
The book phrases this acutely, ‘I am reminded that each of us is merely an adjunct, as those in the future will be, for a short time, to the people and the history that has gone before.’
Part of the process of connecting the dots between lost loved ones and our history invariably involves a descent into a darkness of sorts. And this is the biggest strength of Death and the After Parties. Hichens is brutally honest in describing her own descent.
‘I spill my mess again and again,’ she writes.
And we are allowed in, as spectators, to the enormity of her grief – the ways in which she tries to numb it and the toll it takes on her. We walk with her as she is drawn to graveyard excursions, photographing gravestones and memorials along the side of the road. We’re there as she murmurs the names on gravestones, wondering about their lives. We journey with her to a Death Café (yes, there is such a thing….), to meet with others who have experienced loss. We laugh with her when she discovers that the best thing about the Death Café is the two slices of chocolate cake that she devours at teatime.
As it should, Death and the After Parties moves on to how life goes on after loss. We fall. We break. We pick up the pieces and hobble along. Life is short, and we must celebrate the moments of bliss.
The book sums this up succinctly, ‘We are here for a mere speck of time, we momentarily disrupt the silence with hurly-burly, a short lived exuberance, in the ignorant bliss of living.’
When we read a book, it is the reader who breathes life into the words. Each of us takes away from a book, that which most has meaning for us. When I put my ear to the page of Death and the After Parties, I hear not just a story of inexplicable sadness, but one of hope. A story about the beauty in living, even as we are all in the process of dying.
Hichens writes, ‘How do we keep in mind how fast time diminishes for us, that the years left become a smaller and smaller percentage of time compared to what we have already lived?’
This is at the heart of the book – the fact that time is a narrow bandwidth. We live. We love. We lose loved ones.
Hichens tells her story in a register that has depth in its insight, in a way that glistens with humour. She tells how her mother took ill with cancer in 2010 and passed away shortly after. Four years later, her husband, Robert, woke up one morning thinking that he had indigestion. Hichens googled his symptoms and insisted on taking him to hospital. They drove to Constantiaberg Mediclinic. Her husband thought that it was unnecessary. At the hospital, Hichens dropped him at the entrance and went to park the car. By the time she got to the waiting room and was standing around reading the notices on the wall, her husband had had a fatal heart attack. Still in the throes of trying to process his death, her Dad became terminally ill four months later. It is the magnitude of this collective loss that drove the book.
‘I would write haphazard diaries, and writing about death became part of it,’ she says. ‘If you are writing every day, your body is in a habit and this did not stop for me after my husband died. I found it comforting.’
But Death and the After Parties did not start out as a memoir on grief. Initially, Hichens was working on a PhD on loss in the city.
‘I wanted to explore Cape Town as a damaged place. So many people here have experienced loss in so many ways – the loss of dignity, land and ownership,’ says Hichens.
When her own loss became so palpable, the narrative shifted shape into something more personal - interweaving moments of personal loss with a reflection on a broader, societal loss. And this is part of the magic of the book - like a blurred picture where the axles slowly come into focus, we see Cape Town in its complexity - its beauty interwoven with its torment. We catch glimpses into its layered politics and socio-economic issues, the discrepancy between the haves and the have-nots, the violence and poverty. The theme of loss in the city entwines with Hichens’s personal loss, the two layers of the story dovetailing each other in a poignant symbiosis.
Death and the After Parties is a story about how we cope when a loved one dies. But it’s so much more than that. On the one hand, it exposes the rawness of the day-to day moments. Confronting the artefacts of the dead – their clothes, toothbrushes, the books they loved.
‘I’d see my husband’s things and it would hit with unbearable clarity that I would never see him again,’ Hichens says. ‘Through my tears, I’d write, where are you?’
But Death and the After Parties also takes a step beyond the mourning of a person – it becomes a portal into mourning something bigger and far less tangible – the loss of a family unit, of a sense of belonging to something, the loss of a childhood, the history of who we once were. This is beautifully expressed when Hichens writes about her Dad’s furniture, artwork and other belongings going on sale. The ‘textured backdrop’ of her parents’ lives are lined up and dispatched. This ‘undoing of a collection’, with reference to Edmund De Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes, becomes a metaphor for the disintegration of things that once were whole. It’s the search for the moments in time, before the ‘undoing,’ that propels the memoir.
‘After my Dad died, I started having more vivid memories of my childhood, I found myself pulled into that remembered experience and had to write to it,’ says Hichens.
Hichens takes us on a trip of her childhood as a daughter to a diplomat father, travelling the world. It is the time of the darkest moments in apartheid history, the student protests in Soweto in 1976, the State of the Emergency in the eighties. Hichens brings all of this under her lens, with razor sharp honesty. She writes about her father’s official car being pelted with tomatoes in New Zealand, how his face is put on a poster with the words, ‘Wanted for crimes against humanity.’
‘In writing the book, I was able to look at how deeply damaged I was by my past, how the burden of being on the wrong side distorted my sense of self-worth,’ says Hichens.
This sense of how we are shaped and moulded by our past, how we carry it into our future and how we stare at its ghost when we lose a loved one, is a recurring theme in the book. The past leaves an indelible mark. We are compelled to put it under the microscope when someone close to us dies.
The book phrases this acutely, ‘I am reminded that each of us is merely an adjunct, as those in the future will be, for a short time, to the people and the history that has gone before.’
Part of the process of connecting the dots between lost loved ones and our history invariably involves a descent into a darkness of sorts. And this is the biggest strength of Death and the After Parties. Hichens is brutally honest in describing her own descent.
‘I spill my mess again and again,’ she writes.
And we are allowed in, as spectators, to the enormity of her grief – the ways in which she tries to numb it and the toll it takes on her. We walk with her as she is drawn to graveyard excursions, photographing gravestones and memorials along the side of the road. We’re there as she murmurs the names on gravestones, wondering about their lives. We journey with her to a Death Café (yes, there is such a thing….), to meet with others who have experienced loss. We laugh with her when she discovers that the best thing about the Death Café is the two slices of chocolate cake that she devours at teatime.
As it should, Death and the After Parties moves on to how life goes on after loss. We fall. We break. We pick up the pieces and hobble along. Life is short, and we must celebrate the moments of bliss.
The book sums this up succinctly, ‘We are here for a mere speck of time, we momentarily disrupt the silence with hurly-burly, a short lived exuberance, in the ignorant bliss of living.’
When we read a book, it is the reader who breathes life into the words. Each of us takes away from a book, that which most has meaning for us. When I put my ear to the page of Death and the After Parties, I hear not just a story of inexplicable sadness, but one of hope. A story about the beauty in living, even as we are all in the process of dying.
January 16, 2023
A wonderfully self-aware description of her journeys of grieving, without self-pity. Anyone who has experienced the death of someone very close to them will relate to some of her experiences, and I think it helps prepare for more grief that is inevitable for most of us.
March 20, 2021
The cover and the title are absolutely tops. The kintsuki superimposed on a porcelain heart is a stroke of genius and the title cannot help but draw you in: ‘Death and the After Parties’! How great is that? But to read the book, you have to suspend your judgement of this memoir writer. You can’t help thinking, does this woman not realise how privileged she is? How can she not humbly beg pardon for swanning around all over the earth as a child while others in her homeland suffer? How is she going about with her BMW and her cellphone, having coffee at Truth Café or Knead without apologising profusely? But you suspend your judgement. She is a privileged white South African woman, and that is how we all come across. Not very nice!
The second thing as a reader you have to swallow, is that she writes quite freely about her family: her children and her siblings. It would serve her well to read Stephen Fry’s words: “... it is not my business to tell you about the private lives of others, only of my own.” (More Fool Me. Penguin, 2014 p.6) It is a dilemma because of course as a novel-reader, the private lives of others are what interests one most. But as a memoir writer, one should maybe be more circumspect. I can’t help imagining what Al at 20 or 30 will feel about her writing about him at 11 and 12. But Hichens had an interesting few years, and the story about those years is very engaging, and so not easy to put down. And at very least, the main protagonist is well aware of her own shortcomings.
The second thing as a reader you have to swallow, is that she writes quite freely about her family: her children and her siblings. It would serve her well to read Stephen Fry’s words: “... it is not my business to tell you about the private lives of others, only of my own.” (More Fool Me. Penguin, 2014 p.6) It is a dilemma because of course as a novel-reader, the private lives of others are what interests one most. But as a memoir writer, one should maybe be more circumspect. I can’t help imagining what Al at 20 or 30 will feel about her writing about him at 11 and 12. But Hichens had an interesting few years, and the story about those years is very engaging, and so not easy to put down. And at very least, the main protagonist is well aware of her own shortcomings.
Read
January 24, 2021~Really, dying is enough to deal with without getting emotional.~
~Someone once told me that if you pick a flower, a star moves.~
~Death tears at the established and unspoken rules and boundaries of living.
Death tests the measure and strength of existing relationships.
Death teaches us who we truly are.~
~Death, like marriage, comes with a ton of paperwork. The widow cannot simply take time off to feel sorry for herself, to get through the torment. She is reminded all the time of the myriad ways in which she and her inseparable other were connected.~
~His cancer was treated as an illness that needed to be managed rather than the illness that would precipitate his death.~
~We want proof of love even though our parents are dead.~
~It is true that I had settled into the sidelines, the writer left to my quirky devices, somewhat tangential, berated on occasion for not bringing home the bacon. I had relinquished control. It suited you. It suited me.
We talk of the fact that I'm underinvested in myself. It's time to stop starving myself of pleasure, time to stop bingeing on misery. It's time to do things for myself.~
~Someone once told me that if you pick a flower, a star moves.~
~Death tears at the established and unspoken rules and boundaries of living.
Death tests the measure and strength of existing relationships.
Death teaches us who we truly are.~
~Death, like marriage, comes with a ton of paperwork. The widow cannot simply take time off to feel sorry for herself, to get through the torment. She is reminded all the time of the myriad ways in which she and her inseparable other were connected.~
~His cancer was treated as an illness that needed to be managed rather than the illness that would precipitate his death.~
~We want proof of love even though our parents are dead.~
~It is true that I had settled into the sidelines, the writer left to my quirky devices, somewhat tangential, berated on occasion for not bringing home the bacon. I had relinquished control. It suited you. It suited me.
We talk of the fact that I'm underinvested in myself. It's time to stop starving myself of pleasure, time to stop bingeing on misery. It's time to do things for myself.~
December 13, 2020
I loved this book. It’s beautifully written. I love the honesty, the openness, the threading through of quotes from all the readings around death, around philosophy. It’s serious, it’s irreverent, it’s funny, it’s heartbreaking. Up there with other memoirs on the loss, especially the loss of a husband — Joyce Carol Oates’ A Widow’s Story, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and also Blue Nights.
March 21, 2021
Hichins has skillfully set in print the universal emotional journey of grieving after the loss of a loved one. The book is written in 5 parts: Loss; Grief; Survival; Legacy and Recovery.
It is uplifting, at time humorous and always heartfelt.
Recommended read.
It is uplifting, at time humorous and always heartfelt.
Recommended read.
June 27, 2021
I've read many books trying to understand and come to terms with life, love and death. This book came the closest to my thoughts and experiences. There is a lot of comfort in that alone without the writer feeling compelled to impart wisdom or judgment.
January 16, 2023
What a wonderful book! I loved the openness and honesty. I found it to be insightful, poignant, moving, heart-breaking, and humourous. Thank you Joanne for sharing such personal and emotional times with us. Highly recommended.
February 26, 2022
Real, raw, heart-rending and brutally honest
September 15, 2024
A beautifully brutal and heart wrenching memoir. I loved it.
April 18, 2023
The first episode Hichens shares with her audience moved me immensely. But after a few further descriptions of losses and the author's response to them I felt I was sinking in the sadness, and so I did not complete the book.
June 22, 2023
Insightful
Pulling me back into my past and pushing me into a possible future, this book was excellently written. No spoilers. Read it. It’s not what you might expect.
Pulling me back into my past and pushing me into a possible future, this book was excellently written. No spoilers. Read it. It’s not what you might expect.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews