My Funeral

A dazzling and radiantly funny account of a woman, stoned at the movies, confronting art, technology, friendship, beauty, and all of life itself.

Great art should make you feel like making art,
I thought,
Pleased the idea had occurred to me
In iambic pentameter.

I love when that happens,
The little trot of it.

That the movie was inspiring lines like this
Within the first sixty seconds
Boded well for its greatness.

Paralyzed by the success of her first book, a confessional account of her affair with a male literary critic, a writer in search of transcendence trains her attention on a film. The film is impossible to understand—psychedelic, churning with obscure references, full of sex and death. While the action onscreen unfurls and her girlfriend fidgets beside her, the writer finds herself transported beyond the theater—to memories of childhood, early encounters with art, and the estranged best friend she can't stop obsessing about.

As the film and her mind further unravel, My Funeral asks what art can be, and do, and change in us. A stream-of-consciousness tour de force with an arthouse run time—novelistic in scope, filmic in image, and pure poetry in form—Maggie Millner’s second book acknowledges the uselessness of creating art in a time of crisis, while also making a rousing case for why we must keep doing it.