Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

August 11, 2014
In this valiant effort Doughty, a Hawaii-born LA mortician and creator of the web series "Ask a Mortician," uses her work as a crematorium operator at the family-owned Westwind Cremation and Burial in Oakland, Calif., to challenge the way we view death. Having studied medieval history in college, Doughty found an early job with the real deal: feeding the two huge "retorts," the cremation machines in the Westwind warehouse, with corpsesâsome not so freshâretrieved by order from private homes or, more often, from hospitals, nursing homes, and the coroner's office. Doughty was eager to prove her mettle, and offered to do any number of odious tasks, such as shaving corpses, or otherwise helping Bruce the embalmer prepare them for the bereaved family's viewing: pumping them with the "salmon pink cocktail" of formaldehyde and alcohol, wielding the trusty trocar, and sewing closed mouths and eyelids. Her descriptions about picking dead babies up from the hospital prove particularly difficult to read. Nonetheless, Doughty does stare death in the face, by tracking down numerous ancient rituals (she observes approvingly how some Eastern cultures still participate in the preparing of the body), pursuing fascinating new words such as "desquamation" and "bubblating" (both refer to excess fluids), and celebrating the natural function of decomposition.

April 15, 2015
Doughty's memoir tells the story of her first year working as a crematory operator at a small, low-end funeral business in Oakland and her move from there to mortuary school and into the wider world of the funeral industry. The book is part memoir and part meditation on the business and philosophy of death customs in America. Doughty's experiences with grieving families, learning on the job, and conversations with death professionals all come to inform her personal manifesto and commitment to confronting society's chronic death phobia and advocating for families' direct involvement with funeral ritual and customs. The author (best known for her popular "Ask a Mortician" YouTube video series) reads, bringing warmth and frequently humor to a sometimes disturbing subject. This book is not for the faint of heart. Doughty pulls no punches in her frank and often graphic descriptions of what happens to the human body after death, both before and after it arrives at the mortuary. VERDICT Recommended for readers interested in memoirs with a morbid and philosophical angle, an insider's look at the funeral industry, and those who don't fear the gory details of the end of life. ["Even though Doughty's memoir is difficult to stomach at times, it is well researched, candid, and will inspire a careful consideration of one's own mortality," read the starred review of the Norton hc, Memoir, 8/14/14.]--Jason Puckett, Georgia State Univ. Lib., Atlanta

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2014
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 placeat 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, Doughtyprofessional both in the field and on the pagedetails 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

July 15, 2014
A 20-something's account of her life as a professional mortician.Doughty's fascination with death began in childhood, but it wasn't until she got to college that she dropped all pretenses of "normality and began to explore "all aspects of mortality" through her work in medieval history. Intellectual exposure to death and the human rituals associated with it eventually led to a decision to pursue a career as an undertaker. With an honesty that at times borders on unnerving, Doughty describes her experiences tending to dead people that, through her colorful characterizations, come to life on the page to become more than just anonymous stiffs. The author offers an intimate view of not just the mechanics of how corpses are treated and disposed, but also of the way Americans have come to treat both death and the dead. Throughout the last century, the rise of hospitals and displacement of homes as centers of life and death sanitized mortality while taking it out of public consciousness. "[T]he dying," writes Doughty, "could undergo the indignities of death without offending the sensibilities of the living." In the vein of Jessica Mitford, Doughty also casts a critical eye on the funeral industry and how it has attempted to "prettify" death for the public through cosmetic excesses like embalming. Yet unlike Mitford before her, Doughty reveals that what the public is ultimately getting cheated out of is not money, but a real and wholesome experience with death. For the author, the way forward to a healthier relationship with the end-of-life experience is to reclaim "the process of dying" by ending the ignorance and fear attached to it. Death is not the enemy of life but rather its much-maligned and misunderstood ally.A witty, wise and mordantly wise-cracking memoir and examination of the American way of death.

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