Dancing at the Pity Party by Tyler Feder

Raw, funny, and honest, Dancing at the Pity Party is a close look at grief after the loss of a mother.

Dancing at the Pity Party: a Dead Mom Graphic Memoir by Tyler Feder. Dial, 2020, 201 pages.

Reading Level: Teen, ages 12-15

Recommended for: ages 12-up

Our culture has a bizarre relationship with death. We don’t like to talk about it except in bland platitudes and over-the-top horror movies. Death is sad and sometimes really scary, but oscillating between euphemisms and torture porn does not a healthy relationship with mortality make!

Dancing at the Pity Party

Tyler Feder was only 19 when she lost her mother to cancer. She had always had a close relationship with her mom, all the closer, perhaps, for being the firstborn of three daughters (the anxious, overachieving one). Rhonda Feder, or Mom, was attractive, creative, buoyant, and loving, a happy homemaker with just enough quirks and faults to make her real. When Tyler went 1000 miles away to college, absence from Mom added to the normal anxiety of leaving home for the first time, but Tyler fought through it and worked on her ambition to write for television. When her mom complained of bloating and gut pains during summer break, Tyler didn’t think too much of it until the oncologist got involved. The verdict: stage 4 ovarian cancer.

After that, Tyler only saw her mom during school breaks, and each time Rhonda looked worse. Soon after summer vacation started, she died, and grieving began.

The perspective here is so close up it’s almost claustrophobic; I would not recommend reading this book at a sitting. The Feders followed Jewish practice, and the customs of participatory burial and sitting shiva for seven days after a death probably helped with the grieving process. Or maybe not: at certain stages of grief, nothing helps. Tyler herself is a cultural Jew but has no settled convictions about God: “My spiritual beliefs, especially those regarding death, could (and still can) best be summed up as : ?????” Spiritual insights are not what make her story valuable. Rather, it’s about how one particular death reshaped those lives left behind. As a shared experience of life’s most certain reality, it’s well worth a read. As a beautiful remembrance of a beloved mother, likewise. And it may help young readers—older ones, too—understand how to speak to someone who’s just suffered such a loss.

NOTE: Dancing at the Pity Party just won the Sidney Taylor Award (for literary expressions of the Jewish experience) in the YA category.

Considerations:

• One or two misuses of God’s name; a small amount of mild profanity (e.g., “Hell”)
• One horrifying aspect of death is decomposition, and on one page Tyler ponders that “my beautiful, sweet-smelling, neat-as-a-pin mom” has turned into a corpse underground. That thought, and the accompanying panel, could disturb especially sensitive readers (but see Job 19:26).

Overall Rating: 4 (out of 5)

• Worldview/moral value: 3.5
• Artistic/literary value: 4.5

Also at Redeemed Reader:

• In 2012, Emily’s mother died, a process she wrote about in “A Death Observed.”
• See our reviews of three teen novels on the subject of death: Everything Breaks, Nightmare City, and The Fault in Our Stars.

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