BOOK REVIEW: Covering the Dead Beat

New York-based Time magazine reporter Lisa Takeuchi Cullen not only has a nose for news, she can make you stop dead in your tracks, especially when it comes to planning your own funeral.

I had the opportunity to read a review copy of Cullen’s book, Remember Me: A Lively Tour of the New American Way of Death, released in paperback last month, and it had me in stitches from page one.  The book will take you to crematoriums, a funeral director trade show, a fake coral reef off Ocean City, New Jersey, and inside a forested nature preserve where unembalmed humans make rich fertilizer. Talk about dust to dust. It’s not exactly what I would call a how-to book, but Cullen’s guide will give you plenty of exit strategies.

During Gather’s live chat with Lisa Takeuchi Cullen on September 18, I asked the author the following question:

Q. Your reporting is phenomenal; the details death-defying; the stories laugh-out-loud funny. My question is a personal one: How did you maintain your sense of humor, when over the course of writing the book, you lost two family members and learned your Mom was diagnosed with stage-four cancer? As a boomer with aging parents myself, I'm having a tough time thinking about the inevitable.

A. You know, I wondered the same thing when I set out on this journey: what the heck was I doing--a new mom and a non-deathophile--writing a book about funerals and burials? What I found, Lisa, is that death is a part of our lives, just like marriage and children and jobs. Dying isn't funny. Dying is horrible. But memorializing our loved ones can involve as much levity as the loved one exuded in life.  Plus, funeral directors are hilarious. If you like your humor black.

In Remember Me, you will read about cowboy caskets, a frozen dead-guy festival, and a woman who turned her husband into the diamond pendant she’d always wanted.

With its interesting religious and ethnic rituals and rites, the book is a real gem, too, but it reads more like a series of magazine feature stories than a strong narrative non-fiction book.  Maybe that’s because the book grew out of an article assignment for Time in which Cullen was exploring funeral trends among baby boomers. As Cullen uncovered quirky story after quirky story, she felt compelled to write a book.  “Imagine the audience,” she must have thought, “2.3 million people die every year in the United States alone.” Now that’s a lot of readers. My question is, will you be next?