Work Memoirs!

Too cold to do anything but daydream of escape? I’m right there with you, especially since the heat broke in our apartment building last night and it won’t be fixed til this afternoon and I’m huddled in lots and lots of layers next to our one space heater, resisting the mean voices in my head that say I should just let myself succumb to exposure. Jillian Capewell at Bustle can help! She has compiled a list of great, escapist career memoirs:

finding the right career is hard. And although I like my current gig, I can’t help but daydream myself into other people’s uniforms. Would I be happier following my true calling as a dolphin trainer (probably)? Would I be more fulfilled working with my hands? Staring down Fifth Avenue from a high-rise office building? While a life overhaul and major career change may take more than an afternoon or two of dreaming (which I assume is all it takes for me to finally become an urban farmer), it’s easy to start dreaming big — or simply escape your current job during your lunch hour — with these inspiring, eye-opening memoirs about work.

The list of professions includes morticians, medical examiners, pilots, and, my own personal favorite, Ruth Reichl’s highly entertaining Garlic and Sapphires, about being the restaurant critic for the Times. I’m now also intrigued by the others, though, including Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.

NPR profiled the author, Caitlin Doughty, earlier this year, calling her “a cheerful mortician.”

As a 23-year-old with zero experience, her biggest shock when entering the funeral industry was not so much the piles of dead bodies but the lack of involvement on the part of the deceased’s family. “We would pick up the body in a van and then return it to them in ashes. And that was it,” she recalls. “Often it would be just me and the body.”

Doughty saw this as a sign of Western society’s deep-rooted phobia of death and decided, there and then, that she would devote her career to building a more death-positive society. The aim was to help people deal with their biggest fear and broaden their postmortem options: from natural burials and open-air pyres to ash paintings or liquid cremation.

#JobOfTheDay

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