Are They Dead Yet?
The Art of the Obit
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"Goes down like a dirgeful beach read." -Harper's Magazine
"I almost died laughing." -ROZ CHAST
"My own departure would not be so bad if only Mr. Roberts could write the obit!" -KAI BIRD
From celebrated New York Times obituarist Sam Roberts, the art of the obit: Who we remember, how we forget, and where we find the true meaning in a life.
After nearly a decade behind the obituaries desk at the paper of record, Roberts knows obits aren't really about deaths. In fact, they usually only mention dying once. Over the course of the nearly 1,500 obituaries he has written throughout his career, he has instead come to understand that they're about distilling an entire life lived-for someone whose name he may have learned that morning.
In Are They Dead Yet?, Roberts explores the major questions that arise from the task of producing a succinct yet record-defining account of a life. Who deserves an obituary, and how do we decide who gets one? How does an obituarist choose what to include-and to omit? What happens when embarrassing information, like a crime, affair, or wonky cause of death, makes itself known? What makes a legacy, a claim to fame? And what happens when that claim to fame, so important in death, isn't what mattered in life at all?
With wit, wisdom, and behind-the-scenes intrigue, Roberts examines the practice of writing advance obituaries, of which there are more than 2,000 on hold and regularly updated at the New York Times, America's relationship to death in the wake of 9/11 and the pandemic, classic euphemistic language, and more. Through it all, Roberts brings his humor, shrewdness, and experience to prove what he has learned from a long career in death: There's no such thing as an ordinary life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I wasn't dying to fill in when I was asked in 2014... to help shrink the growing backlog of unassigned prewritten obituaries" on the New York Times Obit Desk, admits Roberts (The New Yorkers), a Times journalist since 1983, at the outset of this charming account. However, in doing the work for over a decade, he found that "the sixteen hundred people whose lives I've memorialized" helped him "come to my own ways of... dealing with death." Roberts breaks down the guidelines that determine who is chosen for a Times obituary; how an obit is written, particularly the "blunt headline or first paragraph, which sets the tone"; and why, in "trying to capture the subject's soul," finding small details, such as a favorite object, can help the obituarist recreate how the subject lived. Exemplars of the craft reveal the obituarist's adroit use of language, wit, and observation: "Eugene Polley, an inventor whose best-known creation has fostered blissful sloth, caused decades of domestic discord and forever altered the way consumers watch television, died on Sunday.... Mr. Polley, the inventor of the wireless television remote control, was 96"; "Reginald Foster... who, in four decades as an official Latinist of the Vatican, dreamed in Latin, cursed in Latin, banked in Latin and ultimately tweeted in Latin, died on Christmas Day.... He was LXXXI." Readers will revel in this lively book of the dead.
