I'm not sure how I originally came across Caitlin Doughty and her youtube channel "Ask a Mortician". Possibly, reddit? Anyway, Doughty's youtube channel, and indeed, mission in life, is all about normalising death.
In the Western world, there's a real fear that surrounds death, it's something that's talked about in hushed tones, and it's not really acknowledged that it's something that is going to happen to all of us. Doughty sets out to change that, sharing details about her profession to enlighten people and hopefully make them more okay with the eventual end.
So I will preface this review by saying that this book is pretty macabre, and consequently, this post will probably be too. If you're not okay with that, that's cool, click out, I won't judge you.
I'm a bit naturally fascinated with the macabre. Maybe it's because I've lost so many loved ones, I'm not 100% sure why, but death kind of fascinates me. When Caitlin announced in one of her youtube videos that she was writing a book, I knew I would eventually have to read it. And it really did not disappoint.
"Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" is part memoir, part research. The book opens with an explanation as to how Caitlin came to be a mortician. In an almost sweet irony, Doughty is terrified of death, having seen a young girl fall to her death at a shopping centre when she was eight years old.
The book continues on explaining her first job, the first part of mortician school and covers all sorts of death-related topics:
- death/funeral rituals from other cultures;
- discussions on embalming - the history of why we started embalming our dead and the purpose it serves (or doesn't);
- the politics of the funeral industry in the USA;
- why we fear death, and where that fear came from.
Although there is definitely humour injected throughout the book, the topics are handled with compassion and the stories shared are treated with respect. Doughty does not shy away from the more grisly depictions of the mechanisms of cremation, and what actually happens during an embalming process. For that reason alone, I would say this book is not going to be for everyone. I think so many people would really benefit from reading this, but realistically some people get squeamish about that kind of thing.
My main criticism of the book is that it kind of tries too hard to be too many things; it's a memoir, it's academic, it's historical non-fiction, it's anthropological, and it doesn't have the length to do all of it well. I think the book would have been better as either a memoir with stories of the dead (as the first half of the book was; I also would have loved to read more about Doughty's experience at mortuary school), or as a non-fiction look into the funeral/death industry in the West. Either or, not both.
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes is a really fast read; I finished it in about two days, and I found it really thought-provoking. Overall, I really enjoyed it and would recommend it.
Rating: 4/5.
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