Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty

I first heard about Caitlin Doughty while listening to an interview with her on NPR years ago. I then found her website The Order of the Good Death and also saw a few of her YouTube videos which you can find under Ask a Mortician. I have had her book, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory, on my To-Read list for years. I am fascinated by alternate burial practices and this book gives a lot of insight into both the traditional ways of laying a loved one (or yourself) to rest, as well as offering some information on other options. 

Here are just a few interesting things I learned from Ms. Doughty:

1. She leaves work each day at the crematory covered in a fine layer of human dust.

2. The funeral industry goes to extraordinary lengths to make a corpse look "natural". Doughty explains some of these processes in...detail.

3. The cremation process uses as much energy as a five-hundred-mile car trip for a single body.

Alternate options include having Dad's cremated ashes...sent into space, or tamped into bullets and shot out of a gun, or turned into a wearable diamond. One could also donate their remains to science, though what that actually means can vary significantly. Or one could be suited up in an "Infinity Burial Suit" which is embedded with mushroom spores that will remove toxins from the body and assist in its decomposition.

Author and environmentalist Edward Abbey said, "If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture- that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves." As a result, his friends stole his body from the morgue and buried him out in the desert exactly as he wanted.

This book was written in 2014, so it doesn't contain anything about my current favorite method of laying human remains to rest- natural organic reduction. Basically, it's composting for people, a process that has been in place for livestock for years. Each body is turned into one cubic yard of nutrient-rich soil that can then be used to enrich conservation land, forests, or gardens. You can read more about it here. It is a compelling option when you consider the environmental benefits and the natural returning to the earth.

This was a short book that certainly kept my attention. It may not be "cheery reading", but it was extremely interesting and thought-provoking. 

 

City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert

In Elizabeth Gilbert's City of Girls, the year is 1940 and we are introduced to Vivian Morris, a recent college reject with no plans for her life. In a moment of desperation, her parents send her to live with her theater-running aunt in New York City. There Vivian meets glamorous people and lives a glamorous life not at all matching what her prim and proper parents would want for her. She gets herself in trouble, she makes big mistakes, and the reader is along for the ride.

The story actually begins as a letter written in 2010 to a young woman named Angela that we don't know, but who has inquired how Vivian knew Angela's father. Presumably the whole story is about a mystery man and his possible relationship with our main character. Unfortunately, the wild and romantic bits of Vivian's tale all occur years before she meets this man, but we hear all the details anyway as if they are of the utmost importance and then this father is thrown in near the end with almost no significance at all. Honestly, I'm not sure why we needed to know about him at all except that it gave the old woman an opportunity to talk about her scandalous past.

This book is long (466 pages) and at times a little slow, but there was enough interesting that I kept reading. And yet, when I realized that the first two-thirds or more of the book had all been the shiny object meant to keep your attention, but without any real meaning at all? Well, SmartGirl, I was kind of irritated. Maybe you'll like it more than I did. There is plenty of description of WW2 era NYC and of theater life and night life. There are some great characters. Sadly, for me the story fell flat.