Monday night, the West Village's 675 Bar was packed with people ready to celebrate the publication of Alix Strauss's Death Becomes Them, a consideration of several celebrity suicides that works at the underlying motivations behind the act. The basement bar's nooks were redecorated to pay tribute to many of the book's subjects—here, Strauss puts the finishing touches on the Kurt Cobain room—and signature drinks like the Virginia Woolf (vodka and Alize Bleu, with a Swedish fish dropped in) and the Dorothy Dandridge (whiskey, mint, and cassis) flowed freely. A few weeks earlier, we'd met up with Strauss, and we asked if this book's origins stemmed from a similar impulse to those of her first book, the novel-in-stories The Joy of Funerals. "It's about the way that we come together, our need for connection, our need to understand after death," she agreed. "When there's a suicide, there are all these unanswered questions; I think we're desperate to be our own detectives and to understand more. So it felt like a natural progression to me."

Was it a depressing topic to live with for nine months, even with four research assistants doing a lot of the grunt work? "A lot of people said I should definitely go out and have fun after five or six or twelve hours of suicide readings," Strauss recalled. "I actually connected with these people in a very weird way, though. Yes, it was depressing, yes, it was upsetting, but I felt so connected to them, because I was doing so much deep research, that it didn't affect me in a sad way as much as it was very intensified. The need to go out was more about having a chance to unwind as opposed to saying this subject was so depressing I was going to slit my own throat. Which would probably help book sales," she chuckled softly.

The night of the party, however, the mood was nothing but upbeat. We slipped out about halfway through, but not before Strauss rallied the crowd into a celebrity suicide trivia contest—as another partygoer recounted one of the highlights, when Strauss asked how one person's body was found, somebody in the room shouted back, "Dead!"