The New York Times Book Review - Natalie Kusz
One can well imagine a publicity director swooning over this book concept…But the book is more consequential than its spin potential, and though it contains frank descriptions of decay, body fluids and human ashes, it is ultimately more philosophical than lurid, more cultural critique than exposé.
Publishers Weekly
08/11/2014
In this valiant effort Doughty, a Hawaii-born LA mortician and creator of the web series "Ask a Mortician," uses her work as a crematorium operator at the family-owned Westwind Cremation and Burial in Oakland, Calif., to challenge the way we view death. Having studied medieval history in college, Doughty found an early job with the real deal: feeding the two huge "retorts," the cremation machines in the Westwind warehouse, with corpses—some not so fresh—retrieved by order from private homes or, more often, from hospitals, nursing homes, and the coroner's office. Doughty was eager to prove her mettle, and offered to do any number of odious tasks, such as shaving corpses, or otherwise helping Bruce the embalmer prepare them for the bereaved family's viewing: pumping them with the "salmon pink cocktail" of formaldehyde and alcohol, wielding the trusty trocar, and sewing closed mouths and eyelids. Her descriptions about picking dead babies up from the hospital prove particularly difficult to read. Nonetheless, Doughty does stare death in the face, by tracking down numerous ancient rituals (she observes approvingly how some Eastern cultures still participate in the preparing of the body), pursuing fascinating new words such as "desquamation" and "bubblating" (both refer to excess fluids), and celebrating the natural function of decomposition. (Sept.)
Daily Beast - Jessica Ferri
"In a moving—and often funny—memoir about working in a crematorium and other parts of the ‘death industry,’ Caitlin Doughty argues for radical change in how we face the details of death."
Natalie Kusz
"Frank…philosophical…engaging, and even wicked."
Meg Rosoff
"This book absolutely must be read, if only to remind all of us that exercise, organic food, and plastic surgery only work up to a point. Doughty is my kind of death crusader—compassionate, unblinking, and very, very funny."
Grantland - Kevin Nguyen
"Caitlin Doughty is best known for her YouTube series Ask a Mortician, and she brings the same charisma and drollery to her essay collection Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. Think Sloane Crosley meets Six Feet Under."
Bess Lovejoy
"Caitlin Doughty takes you to places you didn’t know you wanted to go. Fascinating, funny, and so very necessary, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes reveals exactly what’s wrong with modern death denial."
San Francisco Chronicle
"Doughty reels you in with wonderful anecdotes about her work. Intermixed with the humor is a love of life that will make you reconsider how our culture treats the dead."
Rachel Lubitz
"Doughty…a trustworthy tour guide…keeps us laughing most of the way."
Booklist, Starred review - Katharine Fronk
"[Doughty’s] sincere, hilarious, and perhaps life-altering memoir is a must-read for anyone who plans on dying."
Sunday Times - Helen Davies
"Upbeat, brave and brilliantly, morbidly curious…Her measure of society is fierce, right on, and radical…[A]n important and timely book."
Entertainment Weekly
"Morbid and illuminating."
O Magazine
"Demonically funny dispatches."
Dodai Stewart
"Alternately heartbreaking and hilarious, fascinating and freaky, vivid and morbid, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes is witty, sharply drawn, and deeply moving. Like a poisonous cocktail, Caitlin Doughty’s memoir intoxicates and enchants even as it encourages you to embrace oblivion; she breathes life into death."
Shelf Awareness - Julia Jenkins
"Entertaining and thought-provoking."
The Oprah Magazine O
"Demonically funny."
Flavorwire - Elisabeth Donnelly
"It may well blow your mind wide open."
Kirkus Reviews
2014-06-30
A 20-something's account of her life as a professional mortician.Doughty's fascination with death began in childhood, but it wasn't until she got to college that she dropped all pretenses of "normality and began to explore "all aspects of mortality" through her work in medieval history. Intellectual exposure to death and the human rituals associated with it eventually led to a decision to pursue a career as an undertaker. With an honesty that at times borders on unnerving, Doughty describes her experiences tending to dead people that, through her colorful characterizations, come to life on the page to become more than just anonymous stiffs. The author offers an intimate view of not just the mechanics of how corpses are treated and disposed, but also of the way Americans have come to treat both death and the dead. Throughout the last century, the rise of hospitals and displacement of homes as centers of life and death sanitized mortality while taking it out of public consciousness. "[T]he dying," writes Doughty, "could undergo the indignities of death without offending the sensibilities of the living." In the vein of Jessica Mitford, Doughty also casts a critical eye on the funeral industry and how it has attempted to "prettify" death for the public through cosmetic excesses like embalming. Yet unlike Mitford before her, Doughty reveals that what the public is ultimately getting cheated out of is not money, but a real and wholesome experience with death. For the author, the way forward to a healthier relationship with the end-of-life experience is to reclaim "the process of dying" by ending the ignorance and fear attached to it. Death is not the enemy of life but rather its much-maligned and misunderstood ally.A witty, wise and mordantly wise-cracking memoir and examination of the American way of death.
