Carla Valentine’s ‘Past Mortems: Life and Death Behind Mortuary Doors‘ isn’t your usual memoir. It’s equal parts confession, investigation and cultural provocation written by someone who’s spent a decade staring death in the face and has the honesty (and dark humour) to tell us what she saw…
What makes the book so compelling is Valentine herself: a former anatomical pathology technologist who describes the mortuary not as a temple of gloom but as her daily workplace – cold, clinical and strangely alive with human stories. She doesn’t flinch from the details most of us instinctively avoid: the bruises that tell of final moments, the skin that changes colour after death, the quiet rituals that happen before a body meets the family again. Yet the book never feels gratuitous. Her descriptions are blunt, sometimes graphic, but always anchored by an unexpected tenderness toward the people on the slab.
Valentine’s voice is what carries it. She’s clear-eyed, unsentimental and occasionally wry – never mocking, but with an ironic edge that keeps the prose sharp. She also sees the absurdity in the way society tries to sanitise death: the gentle euphemisms we hide behind, the cultural squeamishness that makes even talking about death feel taboo. And she isn’t afraid to dissect it, just as she might an organ on the mortuary table!
Beyond the physical realities, Past Mortems explores the living just as much as the dead. Each body becomes a kind of biography written in scars, tattoos and medical hardware. Valentine uses these stories to ask bigger questions: what do our remains say about us? And why do we spend so much energy pretending death isn’t coming..?
What surprises most is how readable it all is. Valentine writes with the precision of someone used to weighing organs and noting tissue textures, yet her narrative flows easily, drawing you in without numbing you to the subject. The clinical becomes personal; the grotesque becomes, somehow, deeply human.
There are parts that might turn the stomach of a squeamish reader where she makes no effort to soften what actually happens after we die. But that honesty is the book’s real power. Rather than making death seem more frightening, it actually strips away the myths, leaving something far less monstrous and more familiar: the end of a life, yes, but not the end of meaning.
That said, Past Mortems definitely isn’t a comforting book, and it doesn’t try to be. But it’s oddly reassuring. By the last page, death feels less like a horror to be hidden and more like what it truly is: a final chapter of the same messy, human story we all share.
In a genre that too often leans either towards morbid fascination or flowery platitudes, Valentine offers something rare: a voice that’s clear, unsentimental and deeply respectful. And in doing so, she reminds us that facing death honestly is, paradoxically, an act of compassion for the living…
A day in the life of Carla Valentine - curator, pathology technician and 'death professional' - is not your average day. She spent ten years training and working as an Anatomical Pathology Technologist: where the mortuary slab was her desk, and that day's corpses her task list.
Past Mortems tells Carla's stories of those years, as well as investigating the body alongside our attitudes towards death - shedding light on what the living can learn from dead and the toll the work can take on the living souls who carry it out.
Fascinating and insightful, Past Mortems reveals the truth about what happens when the mortuary doors swing shut or the lid of the coffin closes . . .
