The Undertaker's Daughter: A Memoir

Kate Mayfield

Jan 2015 · Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

“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).

Ratings and reviews

I'm not sure what initially drove me to chose this book. I am a fan of Southern Literature, but not usually a non-fiction kind of reader. Perhaps the title, maybe something intangible. Whatever it was, I'm glad it happened. I won't be able to say enough good things about this book without sounding over the top. Suffice it to say, I was blown away by this book. Not entirely sure what to expect when I went into this one, a bit of humor or macabre? While there is the slightest touch of that, and how could there not be with the author growing up in an active funeral home, there is such a deep story here. A touching, compelling, true story at it's most basic level. A celebration of death, and life. A reverence for the rituals the living need to survive. Yes, all of these. A daughter's struggle to find her identity and hide it at the same time. A man so touched by the horrors of death he chose this profession to help not just others cope but to soothe an ache within himself. A family forced to live their lives around a phone call bringing the passing of a fellow citizen. Again, all these things. see the rest of my review at bloggabook.com

About the author

Kate Mayfield is the author of The Undertaker’s Daughter (a memoir) and the coauthor of Ten Steps to Fashion Freedom and Ellie Hart Goes to Work. A graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Manhattan, Kate lives in London.