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newnid's review
dark
funny
informative
medium-paced
3.5
This one is just for: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.
Caitlin Doughty, a mortician, hailing from Hawaii, has penned her experience of working into a crematory (well, the title kinda shouts it in your face). What makes the memoir particularly engaging is the author’s blunt expression of her interest in ‘death’, as a character, a subject, and a profession. She begins her story, of her relationship with death, in the eighth year of her life, with a thud of a little girl falling from 30 feet, face-first onto the floor, in a shopping mall. The memoir is laced with both her experiences and thoughts on death! Questions like it took her a whole eight years to witness her first death, also makes the reader hunt their past for the same experience. (And, more often than not, one would find out that indeed it took them way too long before they realized what death was!) Her stories of the funerary practices visit the mortuary cannibalism of the Wariʼ, the holy Ganges where the poor just drown their corpses, and the mania of beautifying the corpses in the modern western world. She elaborates on the practices of embalming, on how families pay fortunes, to see their dead, in a way, they would never want them to see! In between, she highlights her struggle with her own life, her encounter with the reality of the death of her loved ones, and so on! She also shares her journey at the mortuary school (yes they exist!) and what and how they teach.
Caitlin Doughty, a mortician, hailing from Hawaii, has penned her experience of working into a crematory (well, the title kinda shouts it in your face). What makes the memoir particularly engaging is the author’s blunt expression of her interest in ‘death’, as a character, a subject, and a profession. She begins her story, of her relationship with death, in the eighth year of her life, with a thud of a little girl falling from 30 feet, face-first onto the floor, in a shopping mall. The memoir is laced with both her experiences and thoughts on death! Questions like it took her a whole eight years to witness her first death, also makes the reader hunt their past for the same experience. (And, more often than not, one would find out that indeed it took them way too long before they realized what death was!) Her stories of the funerary practices visit the mortuary cannibalism of the Wariʼ, the holy Ganges where the poor just drown their corpses, and the mania of beautifying the corpses in the modern western world. She elaborates on the practices of embalming, on how families pay fortunes, to see their dead, in a way, they would never want them to see! In between, she highlights her struggle with her own life, her encounter with the reality of the death of her loved ones, and so on! She also shares her journey at the mortuary school (yes they exist!) and what and how they teach.
That’s all one could say without spoiling the book for a prospective reader!
As for the reading experience, it might not give you a euphoric high but, it is intriguing enough to keep you gripped. And surprisingly it is not as unpleasant, as the topic itself! And for sure, it will make you tad-bit comfortable with the holy subject matter of something that is always talked of in hushed words–death!
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