Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? Big Questions from Tiny Mortals About Death: And Other Questions About Dead Bodies

Name: Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? Big Questions from Tiny Mortals About Death: And Other Questions About Dead Bodies
Rating: 4.093939393939394 (165 reviews)
Author: Caitlin Doughty
ISBN: 9781474613415

by Caitlin Doughty, Dianné Ruz

4.1

(165 ratings)

208 pages21 editions2019Weidenfeld & NicolsonISBN 9781474613415

Science Science Fiction

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About this book

Every day, funeral director Caitlin Doughty receives dozens of questions about death. What would happen to an astronaut's body if it were pushed out of a space shuttle? Do people poo when they die? Can Grandma have a Viking funeral? In the tradition of Randall Munroe's WHAT IF?, Doughty's new book blends her scientific understanding of the body and the intriguing history behind common misconceptions about corpses to offer factual, hilarious and candid answers to more than fifty urgent questions posed by her youngest fans. Readers will learn what happens if you die on an aeroplane, the best soil for mummifying your dog and whether or not you can preserve your friend's skull as a keepsake. Featuring illustrations from Dianne Ruiz, WILL MY CAT EAT MY EYEBALLS? will delight anyone interested in the fascinating truth about what will happen to our bodies after we die.

Publication Details

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Published: 2019
Pages: 208
ISBN: 9781474613415
Language: en
Editions: 21

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