Ali Smith’s Artful innovatively mingles essay and fiction in a playful metatextual variation on Barthes’s ‘death of the author’. As a disruption of ordinary life, grief heralds a state of exception, aptly portrayed by the implosion of narrative structures. Smith’s aesthetics revolve around dissensions from the norm: the storyline features a ghostly dead character and sets an unusual, often comical tone in its bereavement story. Artful’s genre, tone and protagonists could be defined as exceptional, turning ex-centricity into a principle. The exception works as a postmodernist reversal of the norm, twisting the conventions of academic lectures and canonical grief tales.