Practicing Dying is the debut novel of the London-based writer Charlotte Northall. It was published by Pilot Press in 2025 to resounding praise from Chris Kraus, Nate Lippens, and Olivia Laing.  

The novel, a "literary anti-memoir", is a raw retelling of a woman's experience travelling to a Zen Buddhist monastery in rural France in an attempt to overcome chronic drug addiction and mental illness. We spoke to Charlotte Northall to explore some of the novel's themes and editorial process, touching on her critique of institutional approaches to the treatment of addiction, the need to write, sensation, the body, and more. 

Will Aghoghogbe (PKB): Practicing Dying is your debut novel, yet its form and content feels difficult to contain in the category 'Novel'. It comprises elements of essay, (anti)memoir, and frank, often confronting, discussion. How was the editorial process with Pilot, did their openness with regards to genre-bending inform your process?

Charlotte Northall: I discovered Pilot Press via a friend who happened to be in contact with Dennis Cooper (author of the George Miles cycle and a luminary of transgressive fiction), who suggested Pilot as a suitable match. By the time I approached them, the book was already complete and formally bent in all the ways you identify.

Richard Porter, who runs Pilot, is a practising artist and very amenable to work with. From the beginning he made it clear that I was free to edit – or not edit – the work as I saw fit. Each idea and experience in the book seemed to require its own mode of telling, so the (somewhat unrestrained) form emerged rather than being designed.

Editorially, Richard read drafts and made suggestions, but I knew from Pilot’s catalogue that he would not make the sorts of demands a mainstream publishing house might have – sanitisation, formal conservatism, or the imposition of redemptive arcs. Practicing Dying is a messy, anarchic, difficult book. Pilot’s openness was in large part why I wanted to publish with them: it didn’t inform the writing, rather it allowed the writing to remain intact.

WA: Practicing Dying is punctuated with references to other books and writings, particularly what readers may recognise as ‘canonical’ works of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. The text seems to persistently revisit the protagonist’s relationship between the social exclusion that comes with addiction, the expression of her intellect, and experience of a need to read and write (that ultimately faces opposition from the Abbot). What does it mean, for you, to understand writing as a ‘need’?

CN: There seem to be thoughts and feelings I need to express if I am not to be overtaken by them. Addiction is a kind of sensitivity, a seer-sense. I am an addict of the chronic variety. Taking drugs, drinking, and the other manifestations of addiction explored in the book constituted ways to blind myself – to cope, to suppress. Learning how to live with this sensitivity is part of addiction recovery. If I can transform it into writing, it becomes a gift. In contrast to the negative, repetitive stultification of addiction, reading and writing constitute a form of mind expansion. In this way, they feel antidotal.

WA: Speaking of the monastery, it seems to exist in a radical juxtaposition against the other institutions our protagonist moves through (AA, NA, Rehab, medical institutions, the institution of the Family, even), yet, similarities in structure and scheduling seem to weave the two disparate worlds together at points. Thinking about your current work in peer support, could you speak to the role and critique of institutions within Practicing Dying and beyond?  

CN: Most of my criticism of institutions comes through lived experience: haemorrhaging public services, a culture of bloated bureaucratic protectionism, the monetisation of suffering, the lie of the family, the market-driven imperatives and derivative output of traditional publishing…

In my peer support work, I often see addiction treated as a logistical problem rather than an existential one. We attempt to address a spiritual condition through material means – appointments, compliance, targets, metrics. Progress is measured in attendance and abstinence rates, but very little space exists for meaning, dislocation, or grief, which are often the very things people are trying to medicate.

Although an institution, the aspiration of the monastery was spiritual and transcendent. Of course, there were material concerns, but the primary place was occupied by the desire to transmit a spiritual teaching.

WA: What is striking about Practicing Dying is the way that bodily sensations come through so vividly in the text, spanning a full spectrum between restraint, pleasure, pain, and desire. (Indeed, many reviews make reference to a need to have a strong stomach to read P.D.!) Could you tell us more about the role of embodiment and sensation in the text?

CN: I have had a fairly tormented relationship with my body over the years. When I wrote the book, I inhabited parts of my body and mind I had sought to absent myself from or deny for years, with full awareness and sobriety. Perhaps this process conjured something vivid in the writing.

Writing in the first person about experiences I had to shape into a story, felt a little like method acting, although the role I was playing was that of my past self. I did not want to write a drug-a-logue, but to show the banality of addiction – the very human mess of it – and the ways in which it violates both the corporeal body and the planetary body, or environment, at large.

It is a visceral text. I would like the reader to feel as well as understand it – intellectually, theoretically. I want to share the experience of addiction with others. I have written critically on Simone Weil’s notion of attention, and this is how the book was written: with attention (including to the body and its sensations), allowing grace to enter and the unconscious to have full expression.

WA: Practicing Dying has been out for a while now, to well-deserved critical acclaim. How has the experience of having the book out – in the “social world”, so to say – been? How has it felt to have others engage with such an intimate and urgent work? And can you tell us about any ongoing or new projects? 

CN: I have been surprised and moved by the number of messages I’ve received from people who describe having been touched by the work. In this way, P.D.’s “intimacy” and “urgency” (thank you) have achieved more than I could have hoped for.

There was a bit of a lull after the launch of P.D., when I felt a little existentially lost, without a clear idea for the next project. I was becoming intolerable to live with. The morning after this was brought to my attention, I woke up with a new concept and a complete set of characters. The answers had been with me all along.

I’m now drafting a new book – this time fiction – a polyphonic novel set in one of the wealthiest boroughs in the country and addressing the housing crisis. It is drawn from lived experience and my work with homelessness and explores how systems fail people and vice versa: the misunderstandings, misconceptions, and missed opportunities. I’m hoping Down and Out in Kensington and Chelsea is going to be challenging, provocative, and fun.  

Practicing Dying is available now via PKB online and in store. E-mail us to find your local stockist or to become one.