Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty
I really enjoyed this. How can you not like a poignant memoir that makes you laugh with lines like “A girl never forgets the first corpse she shaves.” I got the audiobook, read by the author, who has a raspy, cheerful voice that adds a lot of emotion to an already interesting memoir.
Caitlin Doughty gets a job working at a crematory partly because a B.A. in Medeval history doesn’t prepare one for many fields and in part to satiate a life-long fascination with death. This fascination stemmed from when she was a child and saw another child fall to her death in a shopping mall. Doughty, as promised, gives us lurid and gruesome details of the funerary industry, including some I’d already heard about sewing dead people’s jaws shut with wire, what a trochar does, and about spiked plastic cups used to hold the eyelids of corpses shut. A scene about molten fat pouring from the chute of the crematory retort is the kind of black humor which will probably haunt me for years.
But this book isn’t just a gruesome tell-all about an industry most of us know almost nothing about. Doughty talks a lot about death, about our attitudes towards death, about embalming, androphagy, cremation, what accused witched supposedly did to babies, mourning, and what it does to us as a society when we pretend death doesn’t exist. She talks poignantly about her own attitudes towards death, both her own and those of people she’s loved.
Doughty apparently has a website about the subject, something like “Ask the Mortician,” which I may visit to get more information. I think death and our attitudes toward it is a subject that we, as a society, really ought to spend more time discussing, and this memoir isn’t a bad introduction to it.
