John and Rosianna discuss Faces in the Crowd (Los ingrávidos) by Valeria Luiselli. This episode was originally released to subscribers in October 2020.
In Faces in the Crowd, the narrative unfolds through multiple, fragmented perspectives, touching upon literary worlds, city life, and the ghosts that are present in our everyday lives. In this episode, John Green and Rosianna Halse Rojas discuss the symbolism of the orange tree, the humor that interlaces the book’s melancholic atmosphere, and the changing cultural attitudes towards death and grief throughout the past thousand years.
This episode was originally released to subscribers in October 2020. The Life’s Library Discord and subscriptions are now closed after a wonderful three years of reading together. Check out past books at www.lifeslibrarybookclub.com, Twitter, and Instagram.
Life’s Library logo by Bethany Mannion.
John Green: Hello and welcome to the Life's Library podcast. I'm John Green, and I'm joined by Rosianna Halse Rojas. Hi, Rosianna.
Rosianna Halse Rojas: Hello, how's it going?
John: It's going okay. So this was your book pick.
Rosianna: Yes, it was.
John: And I wonder—
Rosianna: Faces in the Crowd, by the way, is the book we're talking about today.
John: Right, we're talking about Faces in the Crowd. I wonder if you can share why you picked this book before I completely spoil it with all of my responses.
Rosianna: Okay. So this book, by Valeria Luiselli, is actually one I read after I read her most recent book, Lost Children Archive, which was probably my favorite book that came out last year.
John: Mm.
Rosianna: Basically—definitely my favorite book that came out last year. I loved it. And I'm really intentionally trying to read more books by Mexican authors, specifically, but Latin American authors especially, because I find that when I do read them, so much resonates. And there is kind of like an emotional language in books by Mexican authors that is very—just close to the language that I use internally. And sometimes I don't realize that until I'm speaking in Spanish or until I'm reading works by Mexican authors. But Faces in the Crowd is one of those books that I think—what's funny is that if you've been following along with Life's Library, especially since the beginning, you're probably getting quite a good sense of our tastes—
John: Right.
Rosianna: —in terms of the kinds of things we like to read.
John: Right.
Rosianna: And so this is very much one that I enjoy because of its strange structure, because of its fragmentation, because of the—its sense of being haunted by other voices, other works. And also because it's about city life and it's a presentation of city life and also the loneliness of city life and what it means to be in this kind of in-between stage of both being young in the city and also still young, but also a parent in the city. And a writer in the city and what it means to be part of, I don't know, the literary world. So there are all these different things that it touches on for me, but more than anything, it's one of those books that when I read it, I just disappear into it, and then resurface, like, three hours later.
John: Yeah, I thought it was a really interesting contrast from your previous pick, Blonde Roots, which while it is very formally interesting and obviously imagines a world in great detail, it looks and feels in plot and form more like the kinds of English or American novels that I'm accustomed to.
Rosianna: Yeah, with that kind of narrative structure that you could plot out quite clearly, I think.
John: Yeah, exactly, right. You could write a plot summary and it would be pretty linear.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: The book unfolds—it doesn't unfold entirely linearly, but like—all of the constructions of it are familiar to me.
Rosianna: You always know who's talking, is what I'd say about Blonde Roots.
John: Yeah, well there's that, right.
Rosianna: And—
John: And you always know if someone is a ghost. Whereas Faces in the Crowd—I really loved it. And it reminded me more of the novels that I've read from eastern Europe or from Latin American—I haven't read a lot of Mexican fiction, is something I realized while reading this book.
Rosianna: Mm.
John: But I loved the way that the narrative was something I had to piece together.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: I love it when the reader has to do work. And the other thing that really struck me about reading this book now and why you might have picked it now, from my perspective, was that I—I don't even really know what this word means, but it's like—it's the most melancholic novel I've ever read. Like Susan Sontag once said, like—this is seared into my memory that Susan Sontag wrote that "Depression is melancholy minus its charms."
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Which is pretty much my definition of melancholy—is Susan Sontag's definition of depression. So, like, therefore melancholy is depression plus its charms, you know? And there's something really wonderful about getting to experience that feeling of—like, for me, it's similar to the feeling of when you're driving alone at night and you feel lonely, but also kind of exhilarated in your freedom.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: It kept—it just—it kept making me feel that way and I wasn't sure why, which is my favorite thing in a book. I love it when a book works on me and I can't pin down exactly why it's working on me.
Rosianna: Yeah, it has that feeling that I—I mean, I always go back to this—this is one quote that I always go back to, which is from the musician, Lorde, who said in an interview with Rookie that she was trying to create a specific sonic world.
John: Mm.
Rosianna: And I always think about that in books that give me that feeling of mood because it's—it really is like they've created this very specific sonic world out of words—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —for me, and it's like this emotional world. And this book really—well, this just occurred to me just now, but it really reminds me of the book The Lonely City by Olivia Laing, which is nonfiction. It's great.
John: Mm.
Rosianna: And then also of—one I think was my very first pick, which was Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit.
John: Yeah. It reminded me a lot of Rebecca Solnit, like—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —what if Rebecca Solnit wrote melancholic historical fiction.
Rosianna: Exactly. And maybe that's—yeah, that's probably a pretty accurate summary of the kinds of books that I like to read, but I'm really glad you liked it.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: I know that it can be—it can kind of be bewildering, I think.
John: Right. Well, I think one of the things we're trying to do with Life's Library is ask people to read books they wouldn't usually read.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And part of that is being open to bewilderment and being open to—like, because I'll confess. Maybe the first ten or fifteen pages, I was like, what is this? Like—
Rosianna: What's happening?
John: Yeah, like what kind of book is this? And that's on me, right? It's not on the book, to be clear. But when you are okay with that, you have lots of unexpected reading experiences. Like there were a number of moments where I thought to my—and partly because, you know, she's writing about being a writer, being a writer in a city with other, you know, publishing people—like all that stuff—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —really resonated with me. But there were moments where I was just like, oh my god. Like she's writing for me.
Rosianna: Isn't it amazing that she wrote this entire book just for me?
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: I have that experience with it, as well. Yeah.
John: Yeah. But I think that we have—like you can kind of only have those experiences of feeling that deep sense of affinity if you just give yourself over to the voice. Or if you find a way, like—what I found is that slowly, over time, the voice became a natural voice for fiction.
Rosianna: Yes.
John: And I was doing the same thing that you were just talking about where I was kind of like trying to understand what it was in the context of other things that I've read.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And so I was thinking about Rebecca Solnit. I was thinking about Sarah Manguso. And I was also thinking about this Swedish—I think he's Swedish. Somewhere up there. This Swedish mystery novelist Henning Mankell.
Rosianna: Oh, yeah.
John: Who writes these extremely atmospheric books and like, I don't even really like the mysteries or know anything—I don't—I'm not—never been interested—anybody who's read my books knows that I'm not terribly interested in resolving mystery plots, but the atmospheric-ness of it.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: You know, the sense of—almost the sense of confined-ness. I mean, she really is writing from a—you know, in a—she's trying to at once, like, write toward freedom and write within all of these confined-ness-es of having to be like, "I'm just making this up. This is all"—you know. I just thought it was fascinating.
Rosianna: Yeah. And we were lucky enough to have Valeria join us for a Q&A on the Discord, which was so good.
John: Oh, it was so good.
Rosianna: And you can still catch up with it and read back through it for free at any time, if you like. But something she said really early on—it was an answer to one of the first questions, was that the narrator—the novelist narrator is writing with an awareness that her husband is reading everything, which is something that comes up over the course of the book and you sort of—there's this really humorous, lovely, sometimes kind of conflicted relationship with her husband that comes up throughout the course of the narration.
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: But yeah, that perspective of the narrator themselves having an awareness of an observer, but the observer isn't necessarily you, the reader. It's kind of still within that world. I just—like, how do you do—how do you write like that?
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: That's incredible to me.
John: Yeah. How do you write in a way that's conscious of multiple—
Rosianna: Realities.
John: —layers of—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —reality.
Rosianna: It's amazing.
John: It is.
Rosianna: And this—and the—I love the thread about—yeah. Essentially knowing when she's working with the publisher and she—the publisher knows that the poems weren't translated by Owens, but just kind of goes along with it anyway.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Like all of that kind of stuff. Like there's so much humor in this book. And it's very dry humor, as well. And it made me realize, actually, that maybe there are more similarities between Mexican humor and British humor than I once thought.
John: Yeah. Because the humor is very—and I don't know if this is true of British humor, but like, it doesn't call attention to itself.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: An American—and I'm more guilty of this than most of my writer friends, but like, when I tell a joke in a book, you know it's a joke.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Like, you know, like, I try to build to the biggest possible laugh, and this is because a lot of the humor is not something that all the characters are aware—like not all the characters are aware of the humor—
Rosianna: Right.
John: —a lot of times.
Rosianna: They're not all in on the joke.
John: They're not—because they aren't all in on the joke—there has to be a level of sophistication in both the reading and the writing to even get the joke.
Rosianna: Right.
John: Because it's easy to put yourself in the position of the person who doesn't get the joke and just kind of face-value read it. And I—that is really interesting to me and it's another example of how in this book, you are made to be conscious of the distance between the narrator and the narration in so many ways. From the constantly asides, like, you know, "I'm not always telling the truth here," to the places where somebody's not in on the joke. It's almost like it's—I kept thinking, "Is this one way of dealing with the problem of the author?" Like if the problem of the author is that, you know, the author wants to be dead, wants to not be a character in the novel, wants to not have the book read in the context of their own life and mined for autobiographical details and whatnot. But how do you deal with that?
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Like how do you deal with the fact that now we live in this personality-driven culture where the author is inevitably a character in the book because you can go on the author's Twitter and because you know that the author did this, which is similar to what the character's doing or whatever. And maybe one way of dealing with it is creating so much distance between the narrative and the narration that the reader knows.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And the author knows. Everybody's in on the artificiality. They're in on the novelizing of the novel or whatever.
Rosianna: Yeah. And you almost kind of—I don't know. I'm picturing a loom.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And everyone's at the loom weaving it together. It's bringing it down to—we're all on the same side in the telling and learning and reading of the story, whereas I think sometimes what that insistent Lazarus-ing of the author, like making the author very alive, is actually—is a very distancing act because it—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —puts them on a kind of pedestal of power of what happened in this story, but it's also disempowering because it's not giving them the right to tell a story.
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: And it's pointing it all towards truth. So there's something that puts everyone on the same level when you have that narrative distance and when you have basically neon sign saying this is a story—
John: Mhm. Mhm.
Rosianna: —to the point that the narrator is not even telling—certainly not telling the quote unquote truth, but also just constantly reminding you that it's a story.
John: Yeah. I mean, I've tried to do that a couple times, but this book made me think that I needed to try much harder.
Rosianna: Well, it does it and it does it in a different way. It does it in a—I guess like a stylistic form that is confounding and okay with that, you know?
John: Yeah. I guess that's the other thing—is that there's a sense, and maybe this is a first-novel thing, I haven't read her other books, but there's a certain fearlessness to the way the story is told. There's a lot of, "They'll get it."
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: There's no moments of overriding, like no moments where—of sign-posting, of being like, "This is—" you know, "This person is a ghost," for instance.
Rosianna: To be the key example.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Yeah, and this—you know, this—there's an element—it's not steeped in magical realism, but there are elements of that. And you have the orange tree, for example.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And this—and the kind of characters willing certain things into reality and—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —and in doing so, making them true, which I really love. And I guess—yeah, I guess House of the Spirits is another book that this is very similar to.
John: Yeah. It's—
Rosianna: In a lot of ways.
John: It does feel like it—it did feel like House of the Spirits in moments, or like—I also kept thinking of it as almost a stripped down William Burroughs-sized Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, but I suspect that all of these comps are down to me not having read enough—
Rosianna: Mm.
John: —rather than them being like, close comps.
Rosianna: Yeah. Well, it's kind of—those are the faces in our crowd really, isn't it? Like all the books we've read.
John: Yeah. Can we talk about the orange tree a little bit?
Rosianna: Yeah. Absolutely.
John: We asked about the orange tree in the Q&A and the answer surprised me. And also I feel like maybe wasn't entirely reliable.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Because the answer was, "I don't remember what I was thinking about when I was writing the orange tree, and I don't remember why I picked an orange tree."
Rosianna: Which I kind of loved—was made me think of like, uh—what's the—what was the thing that makes me think about? It makes me think about Dumbledore saying that when he looks in the Mirror of Erised, he sees himself getting socks or something. Like, it's that kind of answer. Like there's—there was even like a—there was a real humor in how Valeria answered all the questions.
John: Yeah, oh yeah.
Rosianna: That I was just kind of like—
John: Yes.
Rosianna: "You're not going to give us definitive answers," and that's the point.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: But yeah, what did the orange tree mean to you?
John: I mean, almost like an axis mundi of a kind or like a—you know, like a maypole.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Just all of life dancing around it, you know—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —or spinning around it, kind of. And it made me think about the, the orange tree of my childhood. We had a—it wasn't actually oranges. It was this really bad version of oranges called kumquats.
Rosianna: Oh dear.
John: And we had a kumquat tree in our front yard when I was a little kid, and—you know, it was the place where I hid, it was the place where I went to, it was the—you know, it really—I just couldn't. I hadn't thought about that tree in so long‚
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —and then I couldn't stop thinking about it. What about you?
Rosianna: We had a sycamore in our garden that just reminded me of—this huge, huge sycamore tree.
John: Mm.
Rosianna: And I remember when I was a teenager, my dad suddenly became really afraid that it was gonna fall on our house.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And so, eventually had it, like, cut down.
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: And that was devastating to me because it was this huge, gorgeous old tree, and it would leave those little helicopters everywhere—
John: Oh yeah.
Rosianna: —the little helicopter seeds. But no, for me, the orange tree—I've been doing a lot of reading up on my family tree lately, and my family tree is wild. You can trace it really far back and it makes—so it made me think of the family tree and also, I guess, the non-literal family tree. Because you have, you know, all of these records, especially in the U.K., that you can look up to that—I can trace my family name back to the Doomsday Book, say back to like 10—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: —36? I want to say 86?
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: 10—I don't know. But then you have all these people in your life who are family but not blood family and that's in terms of close friends and other people who come in and out of your life, but also in terms of the creative families you join and become part of—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: And I was just thinking a lot about that and the sort of—yeah, imagining the connection between these writers and between—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: —the people whose works influence your life. Earlier I was flicking through—there was a great little illustrated guide created for the physical subscription for Life's Library this month that Mia Soza illustrated with so many of the different names of the authors and artists and so on that were mentioned in this book. And that I feel in itself is such an artifact of the family tree—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —that is being written about.
John: Yeah. And the—all the ways that writers and artists intersect or—and their work intersect in the book was really interesting to me and is reflective of, you know, the way that tree branches come together and inform each other and form a larger whole, you know. In that sense, maybe it's a little bit like—my chosen metaphor for that is the World's Largest Ball of Paint where each person who visits adds a layer of paint to it. And even though your layer of paint doesn't last very long and isn't important to—you know, in any kind of big way to the World's Largest Ball of Paint, it is still there and it's still important, and it informs the the next person's color choice, which in in turn informs the following person's color choice and so on forever.
Rosianna: I love that, and I also love that with trees—and I'm again thinking of this sycamore tree, but also especially with the orange tree—it's hard sometimes to live in the world and feel like you are part of it. But when you think of a tree—
John: Mm.
Rosianna: —there is no aspect of that that you can think of that isn't in itself reminding you of the circle of life. Because—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —with an orange, you can eat an orange or it can rot, but in any case, it's gonna leave its seed somewhere and it's gonna become part of the soil and it's going to feed or lead to a new tree or become something else and that—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: —there's something that I think trees are probably one of the earliest things we learn about as children and the earliest indicators of life and what it means to live and die and lead to something new. So I was just thinking about how such a powerful symbol for us, still.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Just looking out at the big tree in my garden as I record this, as well, which helps.
John: Yeah, I mean there's a sycamore tree near my house that is not just the most important tree in my life, but maybe the most important non-human living thing in my life.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And I remember being highly suspicious of tree people when I was a child.
Rosianna: Yes.
John: You know? I remember that adults would wax poetic about trees and how they live long and grow deep roots and the invisible symmetry because the branches of the trees look like the roots, but the roots are underground, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I would just be like, "Whatever."
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: I mean, you know. "They're just—they're just there. Who cares? They all look the same." And now I've become a total tree person and I'm just like, "This tree is significantly more beautiful than that one. And as you can see, this is the best tree." Like, yeah. So I—I'm all in.
Rosianna: I think we've all—I mean, like, if you weren't already becoming a tree person, which I definitely was, we all became real tree people this year.
John: Yeah. Yeah.
Rosianna: Because they were—they're such a constant. They're so hopeful.
John: Right.
Rosianna: And even when—you know, we had a—so I grew up quite near Richmond Park, this huge public park. Well, it's not public, it's royal. But you know, functionally public. And I remember after a lightning storm, you'd walk through the park and so many of these huge, very old trees would have been struck down by lightning. And even still, they stood or they were these sculptural objects.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And you'd see birds building nests in them.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And now I find that so beautiful—whereas, yeah, I was exactly the same. Like I remember my granny trying to teach me the names of all the trees and me being like, "All right, Granny. Calm down with the tree enthusiasm."
John: Yeah, I know.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Me too. And I just—I wasted all those opportunities to learn things about trees. Now I've got to learn them from books.
Rosianna: Ugh. Effort.
John: I want to ask you—this is something that came up a lot in the Discord, I know, and I—it's something that I was thinking a lot about too. Can we talk about ghosts?
Rosianna: Sure, we can talk about ghosts. I feel like you've got ghosts on the mind.
John: I have ghosts on the mind.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: I am—
Rosianna: Yeah, we can talk about ghosts.
John: I guess I didn't know that I was partly reading a ghost story.
Rosianna: Yes. When do you think you realized you were reading a ghost story?
John: Maybe when I went on the Discord.
Rosianna: Okay.
John: No. I mean, I guess I started to feel like I was more reading out of time.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: You know?
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: I guess it's just one of the places where I was left feeling a little unsettled.
Rosianna: Right. Well, so the—I mean, one thing to note is that in the original title—because this book was originally written in Spanish—is Los ingrávidos, which is kind of like—I was trying to translate it on the Discord, actually. It's kind of like The Weightless Ones or The Ones Who Don't Leave a Mark—
John: Mm.
Rosianna: But there's not really a good translation for it.
John: Yeah, I mean Faces in the Crowd is not that.
Rosianna: Yeah, it's not that.
John: I mean, I know‚ I guess it has that meaning—
Rosianna: Right, but—
John: —but it doesn't have that resonance.
Rosianna: If you already know it's a ghost story—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —and then you see that, you're like, "Oh, okay. " But not if you don't.
John: Right.
Rosianna: But yeah, because I think also there's like that confusion of like, Owen sees this young woman.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And then—and she sees Owens, not really, again, knowing what reality is and isn't, and also not really trusting anything that any of them read to say.
John: Right, right. Yes, exactly.
Rosianna: Yeah. How does—I guess also it's like what we think of as ghost stories, as well. And cities aren't usually, I don't think, where we locate our ghost stories. It's usually the countryside. At least like—
John: Yeah, barns.
Rosianna: —in English-speaking—yeah.
John: Nineteenth-century Victorian mansions.
Rosianna: Right. Things that creak.
John: Right.
Rosianna: And you know, with darkness, not a city that's full of—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: —electricity and light and noise and rowdy children and all of that. So yeah, I think that's an interesting part of it. And I also feel like, it is another aspect of it—I don't want to speak too authoritatively about Latin American literature because I sincerely have not read enough. But I think the proximity of death in Latin American culture and constantly talking and thinking about a death means that you are living among ghosts in a way that I think—at least here, we're kind of a little resistant to, sometimes. We'd rather not think about ghosts sometimes.
John: Yeah, I think what I responded to really positively was the idea that the dead are still in conversation with us.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And it's partly about whether we're listening.
Rosianna: Right.
John: Like any conversation. But that they are still with us. And that kind of haunting feels very real to me and very meaningful to me. And also not entirely menacing—
Rosianna: Right.
John: —you know?
Rosianna: Were there parts that did feel menacing to you or just—what was unsettling, I suppose, is my question?
John: I guess part of it is probably the city-ness of it.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: The urban-ness of it. But also, I get—yeah, I get freaked out by ghosts. Like I get freaked out by the idea that—yeah, that the dead aren't all the way dead.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: That said, I do think that there's this huge bias in American culture—but maybe sort of broader European culture, too—toward living people. Like—
Rosianna: Yes, absolutely.
John: You know, if you look at your Twitter feed in any day, you almost never see posts from dead people.
Rosianna: You never see ghosts. Rarely, actually.
John: And you never see ghosts.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Right. And so I liked that it was a way of—it did feel like a way of inserting ghosts into places like—well, maybe not times that are known to me, but places that are known to me.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And I—yeah, so I guess it just made me think a lot about that. It made me think about how cut off I feel from the people of the past and from the dead, you know?
Rosianna: Mm.
John: And also that we kind of don't pay a ton of attention to the past. Like, every time I hear somebody—I talk about this in the most recent episode of The Anthropocene Reviewed—but every time I hear somebody say, "We live in unprecedented times."
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And then follow it up by saying something about a pandemic, I want to be like, "There's literally nothing more precedented." Like that's the most precedented experience for human communities to go through.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Like there are unprecedented facets of this pandemic.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: But that part—you know, political uncertainty going alongside a disease outbreak is precedented.
Rosianna: It's—yeah. I mean this—well, it was one of my favorite episodes to do research on and I was just blown away by some of the correlations between now and then—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —um, to say—
John: Same.
Rosianna: —yeah. And I think that's—I find excitement in that and partly because we've—we're in this time when—in many ways—we've paused and we've slowed down.
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: And that's allowed me to reconnect to the dead—
John: Mm.
Rosianna: —in a lot of ways, I think.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And learn from history and learn from stories and just—and maybe not necessarily even learn, just read and kind of become closer to them.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And I wonder if part of our current culture of social media and of just constant now, now, now, now, now-ness is almost trying to erase or beat death. And so the natural extension of that is these billionaires who want to upload their consciousness to the internet—
John: Right.
Rosianna: —to become immortal.
John: Right.
Rosianna: But there is kind of this screaming attempt to immortality that we're having on a tweet-by-tweet basis.
John: Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. And I think that we have—we really have tried very hard to erase death—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —from human experience. I just read what is apparently the classic book of the last thousand years of human death—almost exclusively in Europe. But it's called The Hour of Our Death by Philippe Ariès. I'm probably not nailing that French pronunciation, but—
Rosianna: Of course it's French. That makes so much sense.
John: It's—I found it helpful to see how attitudes toward death have changed in the last thousand years in Europe.
Rosianna: Okay.
John: Because—yeah, I mean, it used to be—death used to be something that we lived with and amid and thought of as a natural part of human life at any age.
Rosianna: Yeah. Because it really was so—
John: Yeah. Yeah.
Rosianna: —part of human life any age. Yeah.
John: And now it does feel to me like we try to look away from death as much as possible. Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And you know, and I think sometimes that does mean we don't hear the voices of the ghosts that are speaking to us.
Rosianna: Yeah, it's why I love Día de los Muertos so much and—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —all of those elements of—yeah, as I say, just death in Mexican culture, especially being so close all the time and to the point that sometimes it can feel overwhelming, like to—like an overwhelming burden sometimes to the dead.
John: Mhm. Mhm.
Rosianna: And this sense of constant observation on behalf of the dead. But there is—yeah, I agree, I don't think we've cracked our relationship to death in the U.S. or in the U.K. because it feels very—people are very frightened of it. I mean, I get it. I'm also not keen to do it.
John: Right.
Rosianna: But it's—it just, I think, creates this anxiety at a level that we haven't really—I don't know, I wouldn't want to say definitively "we haven't really had before," but it seems like that's new and not necessarily positive and healthy.
John: No, I think it gets—
Rosianna: It hasn't been integrated into our life, really.
John: Right. Yes, and I think it makes both grief more complicated, because now the sort of formal aspects, the ritualized aspects of grief are limited to the time between the death and the funeral, which is often quite short.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And I also think that it makes it hard, both when you are thinking about serious illness in yourself or in your family or whatever, but also I think it makes it hard when you're in the very long-term lifelong—in some ways—process of grieving—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —you know? Like I had a friend die when I was sixteen and I still miss her and I still feel sad and I still think about the fact that I am 43 and I think about all that person didn't—you know, wasn't able to experience.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And that never—that doesn't end. I also don't think it should end? Like that's something I really like about the Day of the Dead—is that it gives a ritualized space to that ongoing experience, year by year by year. Which—you know, we don't really have in my—like, even in my religious life, even though the church is supposed to be the place that helps you pass through all the phases of life and into death or whatever, we don't really have that, in the same way.
Rosianna: Yeah. I think it's—the idea that grief is something that ends is something I think people who haven't experienced major grief in their life, you know, believe. It's—
John: Yeah. Well, I didn't mean to laugh. I should not have laughed.
Rosianna: No, but it is—
John: But I—but yeah, you're totally right.
Rosianna: but it's true. It's true.
John: Yeah. Yeah.
Rosianna: Like there is—I mean, and also there's a lot of humor in it in some ways. I'm part of this community of people who've lost people close to them. And it's amazing. And I really encourage anyone who's lost someone to join some kind of support group, even if it's virtual. And a lot of the time we just sit around and complain about stupid things people say because they haven't had that huge experience yet.
John: Right, yeah.
Rosianna: And—you know, and sometimes cry about it, too.
John: You mean like if you say to your dying friend, "But you do so much yoga."
Rosianna: You know, something like that.
John: Yeah. Well, yeah.
Rosianna: But just—you have to turn it into something and there's something about—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —sharing it that doesn't—you know, that makes it change.
John: Yeah. One of the funniest places in the—I mean, this—it's almost cliche to say that one of the funniest places in the world, you know, is a funeral home. One of the funniest places in the world is a hospital.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Like, it's all so—it's everything in extremis.
Rosianna: Yeah, and I think that part of the sort of intolerance of grief or looking away from grief on behalf of friends when you've lost someone is because they don't know how—it's so uncomfortable.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Like they don't know how to handle it.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And there was recently, actually—there was something on Twitter. I've mentioned the word Twitter too many times. But someone shared their experience with two different professors after telling them that they'd lost their parent. And one professor was like, "Well, you should have handed that assignment in in twelve hours." And the other one was like, "Take your time. Don't worry about it." And so we all started, in response, sharing our experiences. Like I had a bad experience for the uni—professor after my dad died, and then other people were sharing theirs. And a friend from school of mine said that—and she lost her dad when she was—when we were all still at school together. And she said one of the strangest things was coming back and just everyone ignoring it.
John: Right.
Rosianna: Like everyone had known about it. The teacher told us all.
John: Right.
Rosianna: But we all just fully ignored it.
John: Because they don't know what to say.
Rosianna: Yeah. And you don't want to make someone uncomfortable, so you just avoid it. And that's just the complete opposite of what you want.
John: Yeah, because that—because it—just in the end calls more attention to it—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —you know?
Rosianna: And kind of how, you know, what an absurd idea that I'm not going to be thinking about this. I'm going to be thinking about this every single day for the rest of my life. You can't remind me of this.
John: Right. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that it complicates the feeling that you already have in those situations—as Cheryl Strayed put it, I think, that you live on planet My Dad Died and everyone else is living on planet Earth.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And then you go back to Earth and you meet people and they all look at you and they don't say anything and they're all thinking like, "Oh, she lives on planet My Dad Died."
Rosianna: Right.
John: "And I live on planet Earth."
Rosianna: Right.
John: Instead of just acknowledging that reality. And then that can be a way of being like, "Oh, there are lots of connections between planet My Dad Died and planet Earth."
Rosianna: Yeah, absolutely.
John: And there are lots of things we can talk about and—you know, there's lots of things still happening. Like Taylor Swift still released an album.
Rosianna: And it was so good.
John: It was.
Rosianna: I feel like I should read—there's a little passage in Faces in the Crowd quite early on—
John: Yeah, by the way, we have—we've gone—
Rosianna: Well.
John: —way off. Way off.
Rosianna: But this connects beautifully to it.
John: Great job bringing it back.
Rosianna: Thank you. It's—she says—or she writes, "I like cemeteries, parks, the roof terraces of buildings, but most of all cemeteries. In a way, I was living in a perpetual sense of communion with the dead. But not in a sordid sense. In contrast, the people around me were sordid. Moby was. Dakota too, sometimes."
John: Yes.
Rosianna: "The dead and I—"
John: Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah.
Rosianna: "—no. I had read Quevedo and internalized, like a prayer, perhaps too literally, the idea of living in conversation with the dead. I often visited a small graveyard a few blocks from my apartment, because I could read and think there without anyone or anything disturbing me."
John: Oh. Yes. Yes, that. I think that's actually a good note to end on. We've gotten to death and we are going to live amid it, and it's okay.
Rosianna: We're just like a little orange pip and we're going turn to a new little tree.
John: Or not, you know? Or we're just going to help feed the soil. Either way, we're going to—
Rosianna: Be pooped out by a squirrel. It's fine.
John: We're—exactly. What's our next book?
Rosianna: Our next book is on Immunity by Eula Biss, and that was picked by our guest curator Celeste Ng. I'm so excited that Celeste is—decided to—well, agreed to curate a book for our little book club.
John: I'm excited to read that book.
Rosianna: Me, too. What a time to read it.
John: Yeah. It's so—why, is there something happening? Is there something going on?Rosianna: Yeah, I'm napping. Oh, thank you to everyone for listening and reading along with us. It is, as always, an absolute pleasure to have you and even more so right now.
John: Yeah. Thank you.
Rosianna: And thank you to John for recording this with me.
John: And thanks to you, Rosianna. And also thanks to Joseph "Tuna" Metesh for editing the podcast. We are excited to continue talking about books with you and just feel really, really lucky and thanks again for all your support and for the support that you're showing to Partners in Health. All right. Bye.
Rosianna: Bye.