The Undertaker's Daughter
eBook - ePub

The Undertaker's Daughter

  1. 368 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Undertaker's Daughter

About this book

The Undertaker’s Daughter is a wonderfully quirky, gem of a book beautifully written by Kate Mayfield.…Her compelling, complicated family and cast of characters stay with you long after you close the book” (Monica Holloway, author of Cowboy & Wills and Driving With Dead People).

How does one live in a house of the dead? 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.

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, where the living and the dead entered their house like a vapor. In a memoir that reads like a Harper Lee novel, Mayfield draws the reader into a world of haunting Southern mystique.

In the turbulent 1960s, Kate’s father set up shop in sleepy Jubilee, Kentucky, a segregated, god-fearing community where no one kept secrets—except the ones they were buried with. By opening a funeral home, Frank Mayfield also opened the door to family feuds, fetishes, murder, suicide, and all manner of accidents. Kate saw it all—she also witnessed the quiet ruin of her father, who hid alcoholism and infidelity behind a cool and charismatic façade. As Kate grows from trusting child to rebellious teen, the enforced sobriety of the funeral home begins to chafe, and she longs for the day she can escape the confines of Jubilee and her place as the undertaker’s daughter.

“Mayfield fashions a poignant send-off to Jubilee in this thoughtfully rendered work” (Publishers Weekly).

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Yes, you can access The Undertaker's Daughter by Kate Mayfield in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Social Science Biographies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. Author's Note
  4. To Be Sure by Larry Sorkin
  5. Prologue
  6. Chapter 1: We’ve Got a Body
  7. Chapter 2: Gravediggers, Shrouds, and Lemon Meringue Pies
  8. Chapter 3: The Burial-Vault Battles
  9. Chapter 4: The Woman in Red
  10. Chapter 5: My Miss Havisham
  11. Chapter 6: Napping in the Casket Room
  12. Chapter 7: The Gentle Art of Embalming
  13. Chapter 8: Funeral-Parlor Poker
  14. Chapter 9: Mausoleum of Desire
  15. Chapter 10: Bury Me with My Bud
  16. Chapter 11: Dem Bones
  17. Chapter 12: Secrets
  18. Chapter 13: Jubilee’s Underbelly
  19. Chapter 14: A Casket in Red
  20. Chapter 15: The House That Richard Built
  21. Chapter 16: She’s Come Undone
  22. Chapter 17: The Dead Take Their Secrets with Them
  23. Chapter 18: Memento Mori
  24. Epilogue
  25. Acknowledgments
  26. Readers Group Guide
  27. About Kate Mayfield
  28. Copyright