Mary Berman is joining us today to talk about her novel, Until Death. Here’s the publisher’s description:
If Ophelia Cohen learned one thing from her parents, it’s that getting married is a bad idea. But if she’s learning anything from her widowed mother’s dementia, it’s that dying alone is worse. So when she meets Luke–the man of her mother’s dreams–marriage suddenly doesn’t seem so crazy.
But none of Ophelia’s obsessive scrolling on wedding forums can prepare her for the nightmare of planning her own. Why is her mother-in-law going crazy over every detail? Why is Luke’s family so eager to host the wedding in their vineyard’s ancient chapel? And what exactly will Ophelia have to sacrifice if she and her mother both hope to survive her special day?
Shot through with wicked humor, pitch-black horror, and unexpected romance, Until Death is a deliciously dark and funny send-up of the wedding industrial complex–and a mother-daughter story unlike any you’ve read before.
What’s Mary’s favorite bit?
Until Death is a horror novel about wedding planning.
In the novel, I spend a lot of time skewering the usual suspects — the stuff everyone complains about on Wedding Reddit. (I could write a separate My Favorite Bit about Wedding Reddit.) The heinous expense, the myriad stupid little decisions, and the wildly unreasonable expectations of friends and family.
But of course, weddings are not just a capitalist construct, convenient though that would be for my novel. They’re also rich, beautiful, meaningful cultural traditions, saturated with centuries-old, cell-deep customs, aesthetic and symbolic alike. I grew up Catholic, and I knew that if I was going to do a good job on this book, I would have to write about a Catholic wedding. I was never going to be able to properly skewer a wedding that took place under a chuppah or a mandap or that was officiated by someone’s best friend in a field.
So, as I noodled on this book, part of my brain was always scanning for horror-coded Catholic stuff.
Not hard to find, as it turns out.
And one day, I stumbled across St. Catherine of Bologna.
The instant I saw her, I was like, UMMM? THEY PUT A MUMMIFIED WOMAN IN A BOX????
St. Catherine of Bologna, an Italian nun from the fifteenth century, is what’s known as an Incorruptible Saint. After she died, she was buried in the standard fashion, but after eighteen days, a sweet smell emanated from her grave. She was exhumed, and her body was found perfectly preserved: incorruptible, unable to be corrupted by death. This was considered a sign of divine intervention, a symbol of Catherine’s holiness. Even today, her incorruptible form is preserved in the Chiesa della Santa in Bologna, and you can go and pray to her, enthroned in gold and velvet.
Now, as my poor mother knows only too well, I am not a practicing Catholic. But the spiritual traditions of Catholicism run deep in me nonetheless. Something about this ancient, Catholic mysticism vibrates at the same frequency as the tuning fork of my soul.
Once I saw Catherine, I was like, oh my God, this book has to have an Incorruptible Saint. What a perfect parallel for the dark richness of the Catholic wedding tradition, as paralleled by the dark richness of American wedding culture itself! Also, I can put in a haunted church! Also also, the Saint encompasses the duality of beauty and rotting, once again a symbol of American wedding culture!!! And there’s a whole maternal thing, too, since Catherine was an abbess — perfect for a book that’s basically about mothers and daughters!!!
Plus I got to write scenes like this:
What I am looking at is a dead woman in a box.
The box is glass. It’s unmercifully clear. The dead woman is, it must be admitted, spectacularly well preserved, but that doesn’t change the fact that she is a dead woman in a box. She is wearing a nun’s habit, enormous and thick and white and plain, complete with veil and guimpe, and these border the blackened, almost carved-looking, open-mouthed face.
The habit does not include a scapular, however. There’s no room for one, because her tunic is cut neatly open down her torso, the triangles of fabric peeled back to reveal her ratlike breasts, her sunken belly-button, a cracked open bloodless chest with the sternum surgically removed, and, hanging between two dried-up kidney-bean lungs, an impossibly red fat heart.
“They say she’s Incorruptible,” Mitchell tells me. “A Saint. That’s why she still has her skin.”
Except… that scene is not in the book.
It was, at one point. It isn’t now. Neither is the Incorruptible Saint herself. In the end, she was a little too, mmm, heavy-handed.
So she was turned into something else. Something better.
You’ll see.
LINKS:
BIO:
Mary Berman is a Philadelphia-based writer. She earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Mississippi, where she was a Graduate Excellence Fellow, and she also holds a BA in writing seminars from Johns Hopkins University. Her short works have been published in Cicada, PseudoPod, Fireside Magazine, and elsewhere. Until Death is her debut novel.
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