Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

Name: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory: And Other Lessons from the Crematory
Rating: 4.179012345679013 (243 reviews)
Author: Caitlin Doughty
ISBN: 9780393351903

by Caitlin Doughty

4.2

(243 ratings)

272 pages9 editions2014National Geographic BooksISBN 9780393351903

Biography Memoir

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About this book

"Morbid and illuminating" (Entertainment Weekly)—a young mortician goes behind the scenes of her curious profession. Armed with a degree in medieval history and a flair for the macabre, Caitlin Doughty took a job at a crematory and turned morbid curiosity into her life’s work. She cared for bodies of every color, shape, and affliction, and became an intrepid explorer in the world of the dead. In this best-selling memoir, brimming with gallows humor and vivid characters, she marvels at the gruesome history of undertaking and relates her unique coming-of-age story with bold curiosity and mordant wit. By turns hilarious, dark, and uplifting, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes reveals how the fear of dying warps our society and "will make you reconsider how our culture treats the dead" (San Francisco Chronicle).

Publication Details

Publisher: National Geographic Books
Published: 2014
Pages: 272
ISBN: 9780393351903
Language: en
Editions: 9

About Caitlin Doughty

Caitlin Doughty is a mortician, activist, and funeral industry rabble-rouser. In 2011 she founded the death acceptance collective The Order of the Good Death, which has spawned the death positive movement. Her first book, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, was a New York Times best-seller. She lives in Los Angeles, where she runs her nonprofit funeral home, Undertaking LA. Born on a balmy August evening on the decidedly un-morbid shores of O’ahu, Hawai’i, Caitlin was an even-tempered, bookish child. Her parents had little reason to believe that she would ultimately seek a life tiptoeing the line between the living and the dead. It was only when she began to ask the pertinent questions that her parents suspected a proclivity toward the macabre. (Example: "Mommy, if I was on the edge of that cliff and I fell off and on the way down screamed, 'Mommy, Mommy, I need you Mommy why won't you help me,' and then smashed my body on the rocks, would you be sad? Yes or no, Mommy?") After high school, she fled east to the University of Chicago, where she graduated in medieval history. Her thesis, entitled "In Our Image: The Suppression of Demonic Births in Late Medieval Witchcraft Theory," is the summer must-read for all lovers of demon sex and the late medieval church. After graduation, Caitlin moved to California, where she has worked as a crematory operator, funeral director, a body-van transport driver, and returned to Cypress College for her second degree, in mortuary science. Unhappy with the state and offerings of the American funeral industry, in 2015 she opened her own alternative funeral home, Undertaking LA, to help people help themselves (handle a corpse). Caitlin's webseries "Ask a Mortician" and her work to change the death industry have led to features on National Public Radio, BBC, The New Yorker, Vice, The Atlantic, the New York Times, and Forbes. She frequently gives talks on the history of death culture, rituals, and the funeral industry, presenting for g