Summary: The blogger behind the popular Web series Ask a Mortician describes her experiences working at a crematory, including how she sometimes got ashes on her clothes and how she cared for bodies of all shapes and sizes.
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* In life, death is the only guarantee, yet many of us live in fear of the great equalizer. Doughty, a licensed L.A. mortician, is here to reinstate death to what she feels is its rightful place—at the heart of life. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes recounts Doughty's fascination (nay obsession) with death, which began, as a child, when she witnessed a toddler's fatal two-story fall, and has continued through her work monitoring a cremation retort and her studies at mortuary school. Doughty pairs her personal narrative with an engrossing examination of various cultures' relationships with death (1800s Parisian morgues displaying corpses for public view, complete with food and toy vendors; Brazilian Wari' roasting and consuming their dead tribesmen; North America's current billion-dollar funeral industry). Not shying away from candid descriptions of corpses, cremation, and putrefaction, Doughty—professional both in the field and on the page—details postmortem proceedings not to repulse but to reveal our modern society's "death denial" (as Carl Jung put it, "It won't help to hear what I think about death"). Doughty begs to differ. Her sincere, hilarious, and perhaps life-altering memoir is a must-read for anyone who plans on dying. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.
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