Good Mourning by Elizabeth Meyer

Good Mourning by Elizabeth Meyer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Kindle Edition, 288 pages
Published August 25th 2015 by Gallery Books
Source: egalley via Netgalley


An entertaining memoir of how the author got into the funerary business. I read a lot of books on this topic but usually read about the downstairs aspects, this is the first time I read a book solely about the upstairs customer service aspect of it. This is a light-hearted book about a spoiled privileged rich girl whose beloved father dies. Realizing life must be more than parties, shopping and travel she feels a need to help people and ends up working at the most prestigious funeral home in New York City. Nobody takes her seriously at first, but she's on the road to recovering her humanity and along the way has lots of insider information on the well-to-do's funeral habits. This is the meat of the book and much more flippant than what I usually read but Meyer includes stories of the industry as a whole, a few tales of genuine pathos and shows herself to have grown to mature beyond the "trust-fund kid" crowd she belonged to in the beginning. An engaging memoir aimed at twenty- or thirty-somethings.