The Undertaker's Daughter

By Kate Mayfield

'On the last day of 1959 my father, the Beau Brummel of morticians, piled us into his green and white Desoto in which we looked like a moving pack of Salem cigarettes. He drove away from Lanesboro, the city in which we all were born, and into a small town on the Kentucky and Tennessee border. It was only a ninety-minute drive, but it might as well have been to Alaska.

When our big boat of a car glided into Jubilee we circled the town square and headed towards the residential section of Main Street. My father pulled the car over and our five dark heads turned to face a huge, slightly run down house. My parents were total strangers to this tiny enclave, but it didn't matter because my father had finally realised his dream in this old house, which was to own his own funeral home.'

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Release date: Aug 28, 2014
• ISBN: 9781471134500

Kate Mayfield

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.

Reviews for The Undertaker's Daughter

[kdabra4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Undertaker's Daughter is the author Kate Mayfield, and we first meet her as a little girl. She lives with her siblings and parents above the funeral home that her father Frank owns in Jubilee, Kentucky; and these are her memories of what that was like for her-- socially, psychologically, emotionally. I was particularly drawn to this true story because in the same era as this book takes place, the 60s and 70s, my mother and I had friends who lived above a funeral home. I always felt both excited and a little creeped out whenever we visited their upstairs living quarters. Some of the Mayfield's friends felt the same way.Mayfield has a gift for storytelling. What I enjoyed most were her younger years. With echoes of Harper Lee's Scout, she narrates how once her father drove her in the ambulance for chocolate meringue pie, how one bite sent her spinning on her stool until she was dizzy. Then it was off on an ambulance call to an old teacher who had fallen. By keeping quiet and collected during the transport, she passed her father's etiquette test for emergencies--and anytime she pleased Frank, that was a very good thing.The story starts out sweet and a delight to read. Then it gets sad and perhaps sidetracked with segregation, mental illness, alcoholism, lawsuits--and I felt a change in the tone and the style, from an endearing Southern coming of age yarn to a loosely woven hodgepodge for a few of the chapters. It's such a downer when a book starts out remarkably and then loses some of its lustre as it progresses. I thought the Epilogue tied things up nicely, though. Mayfield had some answers finally to the perplexities of her family, and emphasized how important the father-daughter relationship was to her. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher.

[ldvoorberg · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A well-written memoir about the author's relationship with her father and her experience of life in a funeral home in a segregated southern town. Even though there's no plot arc -- it's not fiction -- there is a narrative feel to the story as the author ages. She develops several story arcs -- living with her mentally unstable sister, the evolution of the funeral business, the role of Miss Agnes, her own social life, her parents' marriage, etc -- as if it was a novel. It is a good example of a memoir that presents a "normal" childhood (not sensational) in a unique setting with good writing.

[eesil-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I got a free copy of this book from the publisher through Netgalley. I am usually a bit apprehensive about memoirs because I find that they can often be self-indulgent or otherwise amount to the mechanical recitation of a series of events. But I really enjoyed this book -- as much as a good novel. Mayfield recounts the first 20 years or so of her life in a small town in Kentucky. It is as much a story of Mayfield's own life as the daughter of an undertaker growing up in a funeral home as it is a story about the southern US in the 60's and 70's. In a way, Mayfield's story is the conventional story of a girl who discovers that her beloved father is not as perfect as she thought and can't wait to leave the stifling environment she lives in. But the details of the setting and Mayfield's strong personality which comes through in her confident narrative style made for a very engaging read that was hard to put down. Highly recommended!

[livelylady · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Her father is a small town undertaker in Kentucky. The family lives above the funeral home. She relates her growing up experiences in the south in the 50s and 60s with her mother, three other siblings and her father who is a WWII vet. Very good.

[nicolewbrown · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This intimate autobiographical portrait of not just of a girl who lives above the funeral home her father Frank Mayfield runs, but of a broken family and a time and place in history, the 1960's and 1970's when things begin to change in the South, even if the views are harder to change. In 1959, Frank Mayfield moved his family, wife Lily Tate, son Thomas the peacemaker, daughter Evelyn an undiagnosed manic depressive, and second daughter Kate, to Jubilee, Kentucky from the mountains of Western Kentucky to the border of Tennessee. He finds a large house to set up his business on the bottom floors and his home on the second and third floors. He installs multiple phones so he does not miss a single death. The words, "There is a body", invoke a bit of dread in the family, especially Lily Tate who may have planned a bridge club luncheon, that she's using to find a place in society, and then have to cancel it. For the children, it means going upstairs and being quiet and not seen. But that does not mean that Kate does not sneak looks over the banister to see the way her father quietly orchestrates a funeral with only a mere look or small lift of the hands to his employees or the mourners. Frank is like a maestro in his work.The first trouble comes when two men from the oldest families in the county come to visit him and ask why he has not bought too many concrete vaults (which surrounds the casket in the earth) from them. He says they leak and will not sell people a shoddy product. There is another white funeral home in town and they have already sent business his way and now they have made it a mission of theirs to shut Frank down. It is the Southern good-'ol-boys network and it is quite effective. Even though Frank has a young man who lives in the county to help bring in business from that area. Help comes in a surprising place. There were no ambulances back then. If you could not get yourself to the hospital, you called the funeral home to come and get you. Frank had a separate vehicle for that, and unlike his competition, does not charge for the service. One night, Miss Agnes, a spinster who lives in the largest and oldest house in town and owns the only fertilizer dealership in Kentucky, has hurt herself and calls Frank. The other funeral director has been sending patients roses to get their business, but all Frank can afford is red carnations, which happen to be Miss Agnes's favorite flower. Her story is incredible in how she was able to go from a wealthy family in town, until her father dies, leaving her in debt, to being very rich with her own business, a rarity in those times. She shuns those who turned their backs on her when her fortunes changed, so her and Frank are foes of the same people and she decides to help him. Miss Agnes is a delightfully eccentric Southern Woman who does things her own way.Kate's mother gives birth to another child, a girl named Jemma. Her mother is the strict disciplinarian, something she picked up from her own harsh childhood. Her father, Kate would find, is a flawed man. He has a scar on his stomach from the World War II, where he almost died. It was his brother's dream to open up a funeral home, but he died during the war. The torments from the war haunt him and he becomes a man who is not always a good husband or father.There is also the specter of race. Belle, their black housekeeper, helps raise the kids and Kate wonders why it is OK to sit in Belle's lap at home, but she cannot sit next to her in a theater. When black students begin to finally arrive in her middle school, she goes out with one for a while. When both races find out, she is threatened by a group of black girls after school, and her parents who tell her it could end her father's business, which it would. Oddly, Frank sometimes helps the only colored funeral director with embalming or with ordering things if need be, but he still does not seem to think of them as being equal. While this book offers a glimpse inside of the old way funeral homes worked, it is through the eyes of a child, who basically never goes into the embalming room or sees but glimpses of the pageantry of the funerals. This book looks at a family that is far from perfect, at a dangerous time in the South, a different world all on its own, and small town politics and prejudices. Kate loves her family, but comes to realize that she is not meant to stay in Jubilee, but is meant for a wider world in which to explore life. There are many who help her see this, even if her family cannot.QuotesShe threw out most of the deviled eggs that night. What a mess they looked in the garbage: a mound of shiny egg whites smeared with pale yellow yolks all smashed together, the whole lot spattered with deep red paprika, as if they’d been murdered.--Kate Mayfield (The Undertaker’s Daughter p 2)My mother thought she was crazy. What she really meant was that Totty was different. She was different because she …was from the North. ‘Somewhere in Michigan’, my mother said, as if it were near the Arctic.--Kate Mayfield (The Undertaker’s Daughter p 27-8) I’d become familiar with all of her church frocks; now she was draped in her new widow’s black. I felt bad for her. Sixty years, that’s’ a long time, I thought, practically forever. She’s going to miss him terribly. I began to back away, but when she raised her hands, I knew a prayer was coming and I couldn’t resist….’O dear Lord’, she whispered, ‘I just want to thank you today. Thank you, Lord, thank you, thank you. Thank you for allowing me to finally put this bastard in the ground.’--Kate Mayfield (The Undertaker’s Daughter p 38) The South is like a lusty woman who stands at the mirror and admires her own astounding beauty, a beauty that after all these years only seems to intensify with age. Even though her face has changed, she has never lost her melancholy charm.--Kate Mayfield (The Undertaker’s Daughter p 369) Most of the women in our town wore beauty-parlor hair, the kind that didn’t move in a stiff breeze because it was teased and sprayed with enough hairspray to kill a cat. No one touched my mother’s hair except Mildred the beautician. I didn’t dare and I never saw my father go near it.--Kate Mayfield (The Undertaker’s Daughter p 45-6) Belle couldn’t go with me to the movies because we’d be separated after we entered. She would be required to sit upstairs in the balcony, and I would sit downstairs. I thought this was a strange, strange rule. I couldn’t understand why I could sit on her lap at home and not sit beside her in public. I wondered how it was that she could feed me and clothe me, yet be made to separate from me when we walked into the cinema.--Kate Mayfield (The Undertaker’s Daughter p 54) We had an awful lot of God in our town. Jubilee had more churches than it knew what to do with. They came in every variety imaginable, from a one-room house, where the Holy Rollers spoke in tongues and fainted regularly, to the large, money-drenched building of the First Baptist Church, our church, a half a block from the funeral home.--Kate Mayfield (The Undertaker’s Daughter p 128) The preacher told me privately that Mr. Sheridan would be punished in hell [for killing his two kids, wife, and himself]. But I said nothing to that, because I saw no God in the scene before me, no heaven, no hell. Prayers would not have prevented this tragedy. When the Sheridans were finally buried, for it seemed their short time under our roof was elongated somehow, I no longer prayed for bad things not to happen. I knew they would.--Kate Mayfield (The Undertaker’s Daughter p 157-8) [On vacation] We went to a different restaurant every night and ordered exotic foods, such as lobster and broccoli and fruit drinks with paper umbrellas.--Kate Mayfield (The Undertaker’s Daughter p 176) Occasionally I tapped out a Motown tune on the organ downstairs but it sounded wrong in every possible way; hymns, possibly Rodgers and Hammerstein, but never Motown on the Hammond.--Kate Mayfield (The Undertaker’s Daughter p 209) In high school Emily had been a beauty queen, a drum majorette, Miss Congeniality, an accomplished musician, and all this without an ounce of self-consciousness. She was in college now, a sorority girl studying for her master’s in education. Tall, thin, and blond, she possessed the manners and grace of a Tennessee Williams character having a good day, and we loved her.--Kate Mayfield (The Undertaker’s Daughter p 230) The seventies crept up on Jubilee and settled like a canker sore. Was it possible to hate an entire decade based on a dearth of natural fibers? --Kate Mayfield (The Undertaker’s Daughter p 255) Do you think that creativity must be fueled by alcohol or drugs?... It doesn’t work like that. People think it does. It’s tricky because at first you’ll think you have the tiger by the tail. But it will tire you out. You’ll lose and then those substances will kill creativity stone dead. Kill it, kill it, kill it.--Kate Mayfield (The Undertaker’s Daughter p 281) Cigarette-smoking, alcoholic, adulterous, and now leash-holding Big Daddy—Tennessee Williams made a fortune off men like my father.--Kate Mayfield (The Undertaker’s Daughter p 287)

[yukon92 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Started out well enough, but I lost interest and around the middle point... the timeline was confusing and there were so many characters that showed up for a one-time appearance... it was hard to keep track of them.

[itzey · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Undertaker's Daughter
by Kate Mayfield

I want to thank NetGalley and Gallery Books for an advance reader copy of this memoir.

The Mayfield family lived in a funeral home in a small town in Kentucky in the 1960s. Father Mayfield was a likable man who easily made friends and poured his life into his funeral business. Precocious Kate adored her father and followed him around like a lost puppy. She wasn't close to her mother during her early years.

Kate's life was lonely as her peers were uncomfortable with someone living in a home that had dead bodies in the living room. She filled her days with learning the funeral business (except the mysterious embalming room). Her descriptions of the duties of a mortician are handled informatively and not in any way undignified or graphic. Father Mayfield answered her questions honestly and openly.

As she grew older, Kate became aware of a harsher crueler side to her father that conflicted with his "funeral face". She relates her family's struggles to survive emotional and financially.

The story is written well and easy to read. At times I asked myself why she thought she had it so bad compared to other kids her age. Every family has secrets of one kind or another.

She answered many of the questions I had about the funeral process. I particularly liked the memorials to a selection of "guests" that she inserted throughout her memoir.

I liked the book a lot. While not as riveting as classical coming of age fiction, this memoir sheds light on an unlikely topic and is worth the read!

[sullywriter_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A compelling, vividly detailed memoir, rich and introspective.

[dreplogle_4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fascinating read. During the years I was growing up in my own small home town, Mrs. Mayfield was growing up in her small town in Kentucky as the daughter of one of the town's undertakers. My life was not half so interesting. Her family lived on the top floor of the family business, a funeral home. If you were a fan of Six Feet Under, I think you'd really like this read. While the goings on in a mid-century funeral home are morbidly fascinating, I found mostly that this is a story of a father and daughter. While she admires her father as any little girl would, she finds that there are cracks beneath the persona of the caring, repectful undertaker. That her father is a human being with flaws and a troubled past. I found it a fascinating character study.

[samsattler · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The undertaker’s family lived on the second floor of the one funeral home in the little East Texas town in which I grew up – and I was always curious about what that must have been like for the man’s three children. But the kids were all older than me, and I had no one to ask, a minor problem that made Kate Mayfield’s The Undertaker’s Daughter irresistible. As it turns out, the memoir is more complicated than I expected it to be. Mayfield admirably answers all the questions I had about what it must be like to live around dead bodies and caskets, and (in her case) to sleep directly above the spookiest room in any funeral home, its embalming room. In addition, she talks about things like the card parties her mother regularly hosted, parties of her own with girlfriends during which they scared each other (and, in the process, themselves) with an Ouija Board, of all things, and the times her father and his own friends “partied” in the home’s oversized garage area.But all the time anything like this was happening at Mayfield & Son Funeral Home, everyone in the family was subconsciously waiting for the phone call that would announce the imminent arrival of the next dead body – because that’s when things really got crazy. Then, life on the second floor had to be conducted in almost total silence so as not to disturb the mourners downstairs. And meals were most often of the sandwich variety so that those same mourners would not be offended by any cooking smells. To the Mayfield kids, though, it all seemed perfectly normal.But the real beauty of The Undertaker’s Daughter is in what the author reveals about the inner workings of her family. Life inside the funeral home was even more difficult than everyone in the little Kentucky town already suspected it might be. The Mayfield family, as are most, was far from being a perfect one, and Kate Mayfield’s frank account of what was going on behind the scenes is an intriguing one. Among other things, she explores the often-strained relationship between her parents; recounts what it was like to live with an older sister whose mental problems made her a genuine threat to the safety of her siblings; and exposes the social and sexual mores she herself ignored. At times, in fact, The Undertaker’s Daughter reads more like a coming-of-age novel than it does a memoir. Particularly moving is Kate Mayfield’s strong attachment to her father and how her feelings about him change as she discovers more and more of his personal secrets. But even with as much as she ultimately learned about her father, the author knows that he took some of his secrets with him to the grave.Simply put, The Undertaker’s Daughter makes for a fascinating read – and it will be a shame if some Hollywood production company doesn’t turn this into an equally fascinating movie.

[shelleyraec · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Undertaker’s Daughter is a memoir by Kate Mayfield whose family owned and operated a funeral home in Jubilee, a small town on the border of Kentucky and Tennessee, from the 1960’s to the late 1970’s.Kate and her family, her parents Lily and Frank and siblings Thomas, Evelyn and Jemma, lived above the business, housed on the ground floor of their home. As a young child Kate had the run of the place, though she was required to tiptoe around their quarters when a body was in residence. In the first few chapters, she shares her charming curiosity about the deceased that passed through the home, uncomplicated by a fear of death and social disapproval.As Kate grows up, the memoir’s focus shifts to the town and her family, though the undertaking business remains relevant. She details the small town politics the family had to contend with, the often eccentric townspeople, and touches on the issues of segregation and desegregation, through her friendship with the family’s housekeeper, Belle, and her own clandestine relationships with two African American boys as a teen. With regards to her family, Kate reveals her sister’s mental illness but is especially focused on her relationship with her father, a complicated man she worshiped as a child, but who lost some of his lustre when Kate eventually learned of the secrets he kept as a serial adulterer and secret drinker.Well written, The Undertaker’s Daughter is a charming and poignant memoir exploring one woman’s experience of life and death in a small southern town.

[nightprose · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As the daughter of an undertaker, Kate Mayfield experienced a very unconventional childhood. It was 1959, and she was just beginning grade school when her father moved the family to Jubilee, Kansas. There he fulfilled his dream when he opened a funeral home in the family residence.Funerals were commonplace in the family home. One of four children, Kate learned to be quiet and essentially invisible, but never by choice. While her older siblings were able to have activities outside the home, she struggled with this imposed solitude throughout her childhood.Kate takes us through her developing years. She tells what it was like with a busy, charismatic father and a stoic, unhappy mother. Her brother was smart and easygoing, but her older sister had serious anger issues, often striking out at Kate and her younger sister. It isn’t until much later that these issues are painfully addressed.Kate tells of the difficulty of trying to fit in with schoolmates. Friendships don’t come easy to a child growing up in a “creepy” funeral home. Her closest friends end up being the family housekeeper, and an eccentric elderly friend (and eventual benefactor) of the family.Kate’s story is much more than being an undertaker’s daughter, however. She writes with candor of early forbidden love, racism, and the complexities of growing up in small town USA during the turbulent 1960s. In addition, she offers interesting historical background of her home town and its people.Ultimately, Kate Mayfield has written a beautiful memoir. Sharing her experiences with clarity and insight, she draws you in with honesty and keeps there with keen emotion. I loved this memoir.