books

There is a particular kind of memoir that earns its shelf space by being exactly what it promises and a little more besides. Caitlin Doughty's 2014 debut is one of them - a candid, often very funny account of her first year as a twenty-three-year-old crematory operator at a San Francisco funeral home, braided together with a wider argument about how thoroughly the modern West has managed to sequester its dead.

The bones of the book are autobiographical. Doughty arrives at Westwind Cremation & Burial armed with a medieval history degree, a childhood fear of death sparked by witnessing a young girl's fatal fall in a Honolulu mall, and very little idea of what the job will actually require. What it requires turns out to be startlingly physical work: wrangling cardboard-boxed bodies into industrial retorts, sweeping ash out of machines and occasionally off her own clothes, shaving corpses, and, in one unforgettable phrase she cheerfully deploys, learning that a girl always remembers the first body she shaves. The writing is vivid to the point of queasiness in places. Doughty does not flinch from describing the smell of decomposition or the mechanics of the cremulator, which reduces skeletal remains to a few pounds of ash and bone.

What elevates the book above crematory-workplace curiosity is the intellectual framework she builds around the labour. Drawing on medieval plague history, Buddhist parables, Tibetan sky burial, Chinese witness cremations, Brazilian mortuary cannibalism, and the long American flight from home-based death into hospital wards, Doughty makes a serious case that the sanitisation of mortality has cost more than it has saved. She is especially sharp on the American funeral industry, following in Jessica Mitford's footsteps but arguing that what the public is really being cheated of is not money but a genuine, unmediated encounter with death itself. Embalming, polished caskets, concrete tombs, the whole aesthetic of managed grief - she dismantles it with a grin and footnotes.

The humour is the book's most divisive quality. At its best it is genuinely laugh-out-loud, with a voice somewhere between Mary Roach and a slightly feral stand-up comedian. Some readers will find the gallows tone a perfect entry point into a difficult subject; others may find the relentless wisecracking occasionally undercuts the weight of what is being described. There is also a philosophical undertow that not everyone will share. Doughty's case for death acceptance shades, in places, into something close to nihilism, and her insistence that meaning must be wrested from mortality rather than found elsewhere will feel either clarifying or bleak depending on where the reader stands.

Those caveats aside, this is an unusually successful hybrid - memoir, social criticism, and anthropological tour rolled into a brisk 250-odd pages. It launched what is now commonly called the death-positive movement, and more than a decade on, it still reads as a persuasive, humane, and disarmingly entertaining argument for looking straight at the one thing none of us gets out of. A rare book that makes the reader both laugh and quietly rearrange some long-held assumptions.