Nine Years Under

April 15, 2013
First-time author Booker guides readers through the inner workings of a funeral home in an African American neighborhood in Baltimore—the Albert P. Wylie Funeral Home, where she was employed for nine years, beginning when she was only 15. Initially accepting the job as a teenager, Booker first establishes for herself a professional dress code and phone manner, then gradually learns important details of the funeral business like why her employer only used black ink pens, and finally overcoming her fear of “the basement,” where she assists her boss in the embalming room. Details specific to African-American funerary preparations, including styling black women’s hair, give the reader an intimate understanding of the importance of funeral homes in the African-American community. Adding another layer to the narrative is Booker’s own struggle coming to terms with the cancer diagnoses of both her mother and her Aunt Mary. Booker’s coming-of-age story set against the business of death is filled with both tragedy and humor, and is wholly compelling in its humanity. Agent: Betsey Lerner, Dunow, Carson & Lerner.

April 15, 2013
A young woman makes a life out of working with death. Working for an undertaker doesn't seem like it would be a popular choice for a summer job, but 15-year-old Booker (I Am the Poem, 2011, etc.) a writer, poet and photographer, figured if she were going to learn how to cope with the recent death of her beloved aunt, a funeral home might be the best place to do it. So began Booker's nine-year employment in the office of Wylie Funeral Home in West Baltimore. During her time there, Booker greeted hundreds of grieving inner-city families at the door and witnessed the strange and familiar faces of death. Some of them were her peers, gunned down in the tragic street violence plaguing that part of the country. Others were AIDS patients, suicide victims or elders in the church; the only discernible pattern that surfaced in the Wylie clientele was a desire for closure. Booker writes that she felt as though she "had already died a hundred deaths" by the time she was done working at the funeral home. By including plenty of less-heavy details about family life at the home and insights into an industry that most outsiders never consider until they have to, Booker's memoir remains mostly lighthearted and true to a teenage girl's perspective. With death as a backdrop, she fell in love with the funeral director's son, crashed the hearse and struggled with the illness of her mother. Despite the rich material, however, the writing reaches neither a moving depth nor comic height and feels at times as stiff and cold as the bodies in the embalming room. An informative but occasionally too-dry behind-the-scenes look into the funeral industry and its reflection on contemporary society in inner-city Baltimore.

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Starred review from April 15, 2013
At 15, Booker went to work at a funeral home in West Baltimore and spent the next nine years viewing life from the perspective of death. The proprietor, Al Wylie, was fastidious and ambitious, loving to grieving families and mercurial to his staff. Having lost an aunt and fearful of losing her mother to cancer, Booker grew close to Wylie, his family, and the staff at the funeral home. Together, they watched the highs and lows of life in the neighborhood made famous by the HBO show The Wire, as drug trade and violence brought in more business. Booker recounts emotional restraint as families grieved; the intimacy of tending to death; the discretion needed to deal with money arrangements, from Cadillac services to the blue dingy for the poor; and the diplomacy of refereeing family disputes and gangbanging retribution. She chronicles a changing urban culture as funeral garb morphed from somber black to photo-screened memorial T-shirts as more of their customers were adolescent black men. At a very tender age, Booker struggled to convince herself that death lent meaning to life for those left behind. A darkly comic memoir of life and death in urban America.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)