Aftermirth

Hillary Jordan

Oct 2012 · Sold by Algonquin Books

About this ebook

“I stopped being funny the day my wife was electrocuted by her underwire bra.” So begins “Aftermirth,” a dark comedy that explores the absurdity of death through the eyes of thirty-one-year-old comedian, writer, and actor, Michael Larssen. What is horribly funny to the rest of the world is devastating to Michael, who loves his wife deeply, especially her bright, rippling, abandoned laughter, which captivated him from the first time he ever heard it. In the aftermath of her death, he loses his sense of humor, and his career along with it.

Then, after two years of mourning her, he sees an article in the paper about a factory worker named Julio Santiago who fell into a giant vat of dough and was kneaded to death. For reasons Michael doesn’t understand, he decides to go to the man’s wake. There he meets and bonds with Julio’s twenty-nine-year-old daughter Elena, a law student who is reeling from her father’s unexpected and preposterous death.

Three months later, she calls him out of the blue and suggests that the two of them drive to North Carolina to speak with another survivor like themselves Elena has found on the Internet. Their road trip is a darkly funny journey of healing that takes them deep into the heart of their grief and others’, and then beyond it, to a place of peace and laughter.

About the author

Hillary Jordan is the author of the novels Mudbound (2008) and When She Woke (2011), as well as the digital short “Aftermirth.”

Mudbound won the 2006 Bellwether Prize, founded by Barbara Kingsolver to recognize socially conscious fiction, and a 2009 Alex Award from the American Library Association. It was the 2008 NAIBA Fiction Book of the Year and was long-listed for the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Paste magazine named it one of the Top Ten Debut Novels of the Decade. Mudbound has been translated into French, Italian, Serbian, Swedish, and Norwegian, and the film version is forthcoming in fall 2017.

When She Woke was long-listed for the 2013 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and was a 2012 Lambda Literary Award finalist. It has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Turkish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Chinese complex characters.

Jordan has a BA from Wellesley College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. She grew up in Dallas, Texas, and Muskogee, Oklahoma, and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.