Book Quest!: ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’ By Caitlin Doughty

So, I’m starting posting summaries of non-romance books I’ve read. The Romance Quest is still happening, and still has its own tag.

And to get us started, here’s an autobiographical memoir of working in a crematory, mixed in with bits about the history and different rituals surrounding death.

I really like the way Caitlin managed to weave her own experience with historical and anthropological(?) context. It’s an interesting juxtaposition of the personal and the big picture. (Also, Wari’ funeral traditions and the cultural context surrounding that are interesting (and also kinda sad, because colonialism) and I’m so glad I got to learn about them. And get a better idea of why mortuary cannibalism is a thing sometimes.) I also like how the book shows how her own thinking about death changed over time, from ‘funerals should be hyper personalised, hyper bombastic, and have weirdly little to do with death’ to ‘funerals should involve the family as much as possible, and be planned for ahead of time *.)

Also, the nitty gritty and sometimes gross details about how crematories work is fascinating (for example, the way she learned why cremation machine floors shouldn’t be too smooth).

And even though she’s anonymised them, I like how she treats the dead people and their families with... a reasonable amount of respect. Both in that she treats them as people with their own stories, which she should share with care-- but also in the way she doesn’t feel the need to be hyper-respectful of them.

I feel like I should mention this, while I’m recommending this book: huge cw for suicide in the book. It comes up a lot.

(As a side note: at the end she makes a dig at the ‘immortality through science’ people, which made me bristle. Partially because those are tangentially MY PEOPLE and I’m irrationally defensive of them, partially because she thinks death is actually a good thing in a eudaimonic way and that makes me bristle, partially because she seems to think you can’t accept something will happen and think it shouldn’t and work towards it not happening-- but let’s be honest here: it’s mostly a MY PEOPLE reaction.)

But overall, a very good book! And I’ve managed to get from the library her second book, which is mostly about death rituals in different cultures. That was my favourite part of this book, so I’m looking forward to that. (And I wanna know more about the Wari’! I’m aware this is arbitrary, but I’m interested! Also, sky burials!)

*Caitlin has a bugbear about the amount of time death surprises people, even when it really shouldn’t.