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 closet drama about her affair with a literary critic, a writer in search of transcendence trains her attention on a film. The film is impossible to understand—esoteric, highly referential, boisterous with allusion, full of sex and death. While the action onscreen unfurls and her kind but uninspiring girlfriend fidgets beside her, the writer finds herself transported to her childhood, her first heartbreaks, the cruelty of the neighborhood boys. To the death of her friend Raf in a warehouse fire, a truer artist than her. To the charismatic Lou, who’s asked her not to write about them, ever.

As her feeling toward each rearranges and mounts and the film and her mind further unravel, My Funeral asks what art can be, and do, and change in us. Set in a movie theater with an arthouse run time—novelistic in scope, filmic in image, and pure poetry in form—Maggie Millner’s sophomore book acknowledges the uselessness of reading, writing, and creating in a time of crisis, while also making a rousing case for how we must go on, how language brings us closer to clarity, to meaning, and to each other.