Red Sheep: How Jessica Mitford found her voice

The New Yorker
by Thomas Mallon
October 16, 2006

Death became her. Led to the subject by Treuhaft, who was doing legal work for a Bay-area co-op arranging inexpensive burials, Mitford soon beheld the American funeral industry as a high-pressure game of profiteering, not to mention a paradise of macabre euphemism and fantastic technique: “If [the corpse] should be bucktoothed, his teeth are cleaned with Bon Ami and coated with colorless nail polish,” she wrote in “The American Way of Death” (1963). “His eyes, meanwhile, are closed with flesh-tinted eye caps and eye cement.”

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Thanks to the DeathCare Discussion List for alerting us to this article.