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Gallery Books
January 2015
On Sale: January 13, 2015
ISBN: 1476757283
EAN: 9781476757285
Kindle: B00IWTWMW0
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Memoir
What if the place you called “home” happened to be a funeral
home? Kate Mayfield explores what it meant to be the
daughter of a small-town undertaker in this fascinating
memoir evocative of Six Feet Under and The Help, with a hint
of Mary Roach’s Stiff. The first time I touched a dead person, I was too short to
reach into the casket, so my father picked me up and I
leaned in for that first, empty, cold touch. It was
thrilling, because it was an unthinkable act. After Kate Mayfield was born, she was taken directly to a
funeral home. Her father was an undertaker, and for thirteen
years the family resided in a place nearly synonymous with
death. A place where the living and the dead entered their
house like a vapor. The place where Kate would spend the
entirety of her childhood. In a memoir that reads like a
Harper Lee novel, Mayfield draws the reader into a world of
Southern mystique and ghosts. Kate’s father set up shop in a small town where he was one
of two white morticians during the turbulent 1960s. Jubilee,
Kentucky, was a segregated, god-fearing community where no
one kept secrets—except the ones they were buried with. By
opening a funeral home, Kate’s father also opened the door
to family feuds, fetishes, and victims of accidents, murder,
and suicide. The family saw it all. They also saw the quiet
ruin of Kate’s father, who hid alcoholism and infidelity
behind a cool, charismatic exterior. As Mayfield grows from
trusting child to rebellious teen, she begins to find the
enforced hush of the funeral home oppressive, and longs for
the day she can escape the confines of her small town. In The Undertaker’s Daughter, Kate has written a triumph of
a memoir. This vivid and stranger-than-fiction true story
ultimately teaches us how living in a house of death can
prepare one for life.
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