A review of Caitlin Doughty’s SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES

Caitlin Doughty offers a masterclass in body disposal and the hybrid memoir in Smoke Gets In Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory.

Siddharta Guatama, the Buddha, only reached enlightenment after he ventured beyond the protective walls of his father’s palace and was confronted with poverty, disease, and—notably—a burning body. The corpse was the catalyst for his spiritual transformation.

Two centuries later, author Caitlin Doughty calls on us to “bring back responsible exposure to decomposition” to spark our humanity. She should know.

Doughty’s been death-obsessed since she was eight and saw a young girl plunge to a traumatic death from the second story of a Honolulu shopping mall. Even a degree in medieval history, where she studied witches accused of burning dead babies, wasn’t enough to satisfy Doughty’s morbid proclivities, nor cure her PTSD. “I wanted the harder stuff: real bodies, real death.”

So, at twenty-three, she took a job as a crematory operator at Westwind Cremation & Burial in San Francisco. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes chronicles her first year as a novice mortician. With its everything-you-always-wanted-to-know-about-body-disposal-but-were-afraid-to-ask plethora of grisly details, the 2014 New York Times bestseller is not for the squeamish.

In the crematory, Doughty wrangles brown cardboard-boxed bodies stacked Tetris-style to the top of the “reefer.” Each corpse awaits its hours-long sojourn in the 1500-degree-Farenheit cremation chamber en route to the cremulator—a kind of Vitamix for skeletons, which is the final stage in transforming an adult corpse into four to seven pounds of ash and bone.

The macabre memento mori is a smart, acerbic, and funny foray into our death-phobic culture written by a self-described “leader in the cult of the corpse” whose influence extends to Mary Roach’s Stiff and Sallie Tisdale’s Advice for Future Corpses. It’s also a direct attack on North America’s billion-dollar funeral industry. Doughty pushes back hard against gratuitous funerary practices like embalming, expensive coffins, and concrete tombs. She yanks the cherry headstone off the top of the “death-denial sundae” and challenges us to face facts: “the death rate is 100%.”

“When you know that death is coming for you, the thought inspires you to be ambitious, to apologize to old enemies, call your grandparents, work less, travel more, learn Russian, take up knitting. Fall in love.”

With references from philosophy, literature, history, and ethnography to contextualize her mortality pilgrimage, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes is a masterclass on how to write a memoir that’s both personal and educational without feeling maudlin or textbooky. From cannibalism to Christianity; Hans Christian Andersen to Rebecca Solnit; and suicide to donating your body to cure cancer (“Note: results may vary”), Doughty is confident in her voice and opinions.

She has a keen sense of how much space to devote to any particular diversion. Proving our proclivity for death rituals via ninety-five-thousand-year-old early Homo sapiens’ burial practices merits only a few paragraphs; while it takes four fascinating pages to make the case that if we had been born into the Brazilian Wari’ tribe “the cannibalism we dismiss as barbarism would have been our own cherished custom.”

The segues from memoir to reportage and back again are seamless, never forced. When a crowd of neighbours gather as she and a colleague remove a body from a suburban home, Doughty leverages the experience to argue the developed world’s “privilege” to hide from death. “They gawked at us as if we were detectives or coroners pulling a body from a violent murder scene, not two mortuary workers handling a woman in her 90s who had died quietly at home in bed.” Contrast this with Italy in the 1300s when, after an outbreak of plague, “bodies of the victims would lie in the street in full view of the public, sometimes for days” until they were carted away and layered, lasagna-style, in mass graves. After another page of historical perspective, we are reeled back to the present. “For the few minutes it took Chris and me to roll ‘Mom’ from her front door to the back of the van, we gave the dog walkers and yoga moms a cheap, manageable thrill. A whiff of depravity, a small taste of their own mortality.”

Since her naïve mortuary beginnings, “a girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves,” Doughty has made a life out of death and demystified the end for millions through her AskAMortician YouTube channel, Death in the Afternoon podcast, and two post-Smoke books. She founded The Order of Good Death—a non-profit focused on reforming the funeral industry and opened her own affordable funeral home in Los Angeles.

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty is available from W.W. Norton.