Published in 2008, Nothing to be Frightened Of deals with the universal fear of death from a variety of angles and perspectives. The book defies easy categorisation since it is a profoundly hybrid text which consists of a family memoir, meditations on death and the fear of death, as well as Julian Barnes’ conversations with his brother who is a philosopher, there is also the reckoning of religion and of afterlife. The book also offers a powerful celebration of art and literature as attempts to achieve ‘symbolic immortality’. Drawing on the insights offered by terror-management theory, this article aims to examine the humorous and witty treatment of death and the fear of death in Julian Barnes’ Nothing to be Frightened Of. In the course of my analysis, I will particularly focus on the ways in which the writer engages with a number of alternative coping mechanisms people utilise while dealing with the fear of death. In doing that, I will also argue that Nothing to be Frightened Of itself can be seen as Barnes’ way of confronting his own mortality and tackling his own fear of death in order to relieve emotional tension engendered precisely by his own fear.