CLEO DANG WOULD RATHER BE DEAD

A new mother, reeling from the loss of her baby, finds hope in a surprising place—a funeral home.

Cleo Dang is careening through life as she navigates the loss of her daughter, Daisy, shortly after birth. In her rage and pain, Cleo alienates her mirror-like best friend, Paloma, who’s reveling in the birth of her own baby; her husband, Ethan, who is also grieving but seems more and more distant; and her well-meaning mother, who sends inspirational quotes from the likes of Edna St. Vincent Millay and James Baldwin. Cleo’s despair eventually drives her to extremes: Breaking into Paloma’s house and cuddling her newborn’s dumpling toy as if it were a baby; Googling things like, “Is it possible to cry too much?”; and succumbing to a meltdown involving a half-empty cup of coffee and a co-worker’s computer. Then, when Cleo goes to the funeral home to pick up Daisy’s ashes, the owner offers her a job—and to her own surprise, she takes it. Slowly, she finds a place among the ragtag staff—young Rachel, who brings Cleo offerings of sweets and says she looks like “someone who enjoys dessert”; beautiful Ana, who so tenderly attends to the hair and makeup of people about to be buried. Then there’s Kenneth, her boss, who’s full of eccentricities—he eats his pizza crust-first and has a mysterious locked mahogany hutch and a Mason jar full of mustache hairs—but he shows an amazing capacity for compassion. By working with other people through their own heartbreak, Cleo slowly crawls, then walks, her way back to the land of the living, even though her sadness still follows her around “like a needy toddler.” Nguyen is brilliant in her depiction of the agony of grief as well as its absurdity and surprising capacity for tender connection.

An astonishing portrait of grief and an ode to the beauty that manages to live in its midst.