Scan barcode
A review by sarahbythebook
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty
emotional
funny
informative
medium-paced
5.0
This was an excellent book! It has a similar tone to Mary Roach’s Stiff, but as a memoir, it achieves a much more personal quality. It’s rare for a book to make me tear up, but this one did it—and then had me laughing a few pages later.
Bruce and Mike and the various decedents are rich figures, made all the better for the fact that they’re real. This book is more than an amusing memoir of a crematorium worker, though. Doughty is pushing back against American death culture, challenging our understanding and pushing us to dig deeper into what we know and want from life—and death.
Between this and Stiff, I’ve been thinking a lot more about what I want and don’t want once I die, and it’s not so scary once you get that peak behind the curtain.
Highly recommend.
Bruce and Mike and the various decedents are rich figures, made all the better for the fact that they’re real. This book is more than an amusing memoir of a crematorium worker, though. Doughty is pushing back against American death culture, challenging our understanding and pushing us to dig deeper into what we know and want from life—and death.
Between this and Stiff, I’ve been thinking a lot more about what I want and don’t want once I die, and it’s not so scary once you get that peak behind the curtain.
Highly recommend.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death
Moderate: Suicidal thoughts, Suicide, and Suicide attempt