How Much Dies It Cost to Renew a Passport
Take a morbidly fascinating subject, add the Upper East Side and a maverick party girl, and you've got a page-turning memoir about what goes on behind the scenes at the funeral home where anyone who's anyone in New York goes to be embalmed.
Good Mourning (Gallery Books) by Elizabeth Meyer (with Caitlin Moscatello) is being touted as Six Feet Under meets Gossip Girl / Sex In The City / The Devil Wears Prada. To that I would like to add Downton Abbey, thanks to an upstairs/downstairs subplot in which the author, Liz, who comes from money, incurs the animus of her colleagues, who call her "perra rica" ("rich bitch.")
To some extent the book is a funeral industry tell-all, offering an insider's look at why some people choose to make their last rites more like Sweet 16s or destination weddings. Some of the stories about backstage hi-jinks at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on Madison and 81st (catty-corner from an agnès b.)have the farcical quality of the classicI Love Lucy candy factory episode in which Lucy can't keep up with the conveyor belt and the chocolate treats end up in her mouth.
When the tome makes the inevitable leap to celluloid, I see Anne Hathaway reprising elements of her persona in Prada, but instead of being in a frenzy over getting the unpublished Harry Potter manuscript, she'll be yelling, "I lost the body!"
For me, the memoir went deeper. The story may be set in the business of death, but it is actually about a lost girl getting a life.
Liz is less Blair Waldorf than a younger version of Odd Mom Out character "Jill Weber," who's based on Jill Kargman, the Bravo comedy's rebel socialite.
Yes, Liz was once a member of the overeducated/underemployed club, ripe to be funneled into a career in fashion or PR (or the combo platter: fashion PR.) But she wants more. Always one to zig while others zag – the type I personally admire – she lets the loss of her beloved dad guide her to an unlikely career. Having lost her mojo (i.e., the desire to get up at 11 a.m. and go to Paris on a whim) she wants to put her life back together in order to do him proud..
Cocktail party stories aside, the book becomes a spot-on how-to for young people starting out in New York, regardless of what industry.
Liz not only pinpoints her strengths and is determined to turn them into a profession, but does so in the face of horrified disapproval from her family. She leaves her ego at the mausoleum door, as it were, starting at the bottom as a receptionist, making a salary equivalent to a quick European holiday and a designer handbag. And she has an advantage: she knows (or rather knew) many of the Campbell home's clients, and even when she doesn't, she knows exactly how to deal with their families.
Her slacker colleagues don't see it that way, of course, and I here felt her pain. Even though I did not grow up with the kind of wealth that resides on Fifth Avenue, Bronx-born me married a successful man. In my last full-time staff position, before becoming a stay-at-home-mother/freelancer, all it took to be resented was not tackling the secretary as she walked down the hallway passing out paychecks. I can only imagine the insecurity Liz's pedigree aroused in non-monied employees.
Her reaction is to ignore the dirty looks and focusing on the bereaved, until finally the rumors and harassment go too far. At that point she faces a choice whether to adapt and try to transform the industry, or simply move on. Aren't you curious to find out what she does?
Lorraine Duffy Merkl Lorraine Duffy Merkl is the author of the novels FAT CHICK and BACK TO WORK SHE GOES.
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How Much Dies It Cost to Renew a Passport
Source: https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/reviews/a3602/how-the-other-half-dies/