Barrelhouse Reviews: Dancing at the Pity Party, by Tyler Feder

Review by Josie Kochendorfer

Dial Books / April, 2020 / 208 pp

When she was a freshman in college, Tyler Feder’s mother was diagnosed with cancer, and when she was a sophomore, she watched her mother die. Dancing at the Pity Party: A Dead Mom Graphic Memoir is a moving visual narrative of Feder’s grief process and how she has spent the past ten years coping with her mother’s death.

My own mother died when I was a junior in college. I won’t pretend that my story exactly mirrors Feder’s, but I did see both myself and my mother in her story – my mother’s process of deterioration, and my process of living through it. Like hers, my mother sewed my Halloween costumes as a child, and I deeply miss the sound of her laugh. And, like Feder, my life as a motherless daughter has been a rollercoaster of crying, awkward conversations, and dead mom jokes.

Feder’s memoir moves linearly through time. The narrative begins when her parents drop her off at college, then moves through her mother’s death and the decade of grieving that follows. Though time moves forward, Feder makes a point to show that grief does not, or at least not in the same way.

At the end of chapter two, after watching her mother take her last breath, Feder includes a page dedicated to the Elisabeth Kubler-Ross Stages of Grief. At the top, she lists out the stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. At the bottom, she draws her own version. Arrows flow in different directions, intertwine with one another, and point to other experiences--depression, fury, annoyance, nail-biting, screaming, neediness, wanting to be alone, dramatic sighing, and wild laughter. Feder shows the difficult truth of surviving a loss: that life continues to move, though not in a carefully prescribed direction.

She balances that reality with grace, showing us how she established what she calls the New Normal. Throughout the chapter by that name, she recounts instances of life moving forward while she lives with the fact that her mother has died: telling her roommate for the first time, writing it down as a fun fact for a class, and celebrating her first birthday without her mom. She writes:

…after she died, [my family and I] talked about the strangeness that all of this would eventually feel normal. As the months and years passed, it became clear: this is the new normal. The New Normal is like the old normal, except that everything is tinged with a secret sadness. Sometimes the sadness is quiet, a gentle reminder during the most joyous of occasions. Sometimes it’s loud, gut punches and wails. Sometimes it’s awkwardness, frustration, or anger. Most of the time, though, the sadness sits in the corner of my mind, peaceful and still.

After my mother died, I tried to rush back into how life was before. I didn’t take time off from school or work, and I only told a few people about her death. I didn’t want to be treated differently. I didn’t want everyone to look at me with sadness. I didn’t want to be defined by my mother’s death. Mostly, I didn’t want to grieve.

The truth is that everything changed after she died.

I wept during the first few Mother’s Days after my mother’s death. My heart ached again this year, but I did not hurt as much as I once did. In Feder’s concept of a New Normal, I can finally accept that I will always feel a twinge of sadness about my mother. Feder liberates us from feeling as if we need to get back to how life was before. She teaches that grief and longing do not have expiration dates, and that experiencing them doesn’t mar us as wounded but instead highlights us as complex, living humans.

Feder’s art is simple and bright. Her characters demonstrate diversity in race, ability, and body size. Her use of millennial pink and pastel blues and greens makes this book beautiful and welcoming on the surface and comforting throughout (particularly for a book about a dead mom). Because most of the colors are vibrant pastels, when Feder does use dark shades of blue and gray, they hit you in the gut.

Dancing at the Pity Party’s color scheme shows how quickly grief can send us into darkness and how heavy our grief feels in contrast to the levity of the world around us. Feder’s ratio of pastels to shadows suggests that both joy and sorrow can occupy the same place. This book takes on those competing emotions, showing readers what it is like to feel everything at once. The tone becomes bittersweet when Feder speaks lovingly of her mother; we know the pain she will feel later.

Feder’s choice to end each chapter by focusing on the flow of grief, and how to cope with it, reminds us that her project intends to show the reader how it feels to live with grief in the long term. Her memoir teaches us how to hold grief and happiness at the same time, a process that creates a sustainable New Normal.

In the penultimate chapter, Feder explores the ways her mother’s death still follows her, and how the sorrow and the anger never truly go away. In the same chapter, though, she shares her dream to create a safe place, a sanctuary for the Dead Moms Club where we can “talk about the awful things with a smile and can talk about the non-sad things while wiping back tears.” We can share photos and swap stories and scream in a beautifully drawn soundproof booth. We can rally together on deathiversaries and help each other stay off social media on Mother’s Day. Though I don’t know her personally, and I don’t know the people in her Dead Mom’s Club renderings, I feel as close to them as I do my own friends. Though grief often feels isolating, this book will always bring comfort.

Josie Kochendorfer is a writer based in Columbus, Ohio, where she received her MFA in nonfiction from Ohio State. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Account, Rough Cut Press, and elsewhere. You can read her work at josiekochendorfer.com and find her on Twitter @josiecelena.