THIS WILL ALL BE OVER SOON

Saturday Night Live cast member Strong shares her grief in the wake of her cousin’s death, both to liberate herself from the pain and to memorialize him.

The book is essentially the author’s journal from March 2020 (“I don’t know how to tell this story. I don’t quite know what the story is. Because I don’t know when it starts. Or how it ends”) to March 2021: “I don’t know what I’ve learned or what I know….Here’s a thing I know for sure: I had a cousin named Owen who had red hair as a little boy and he was a serious kid and he loved birds. He taught me about love during his life and he’s teaching me about love after.” Strong chronicles the months following Owen’s death from brain cancer at age 30 and provides glimpses of life during the pandemic. Her prose is sincere yet largely flavorless. Without establishing a narrative arc, the author offers little in the way of revelation, for herself or readers, delivering a collection of non sequiturs, text messages, banal confessions, and scattershot notes typed on her phone. Fans hoping for details about her experiences at SNL will be disappointed—and also surprised by the lack of humor. The author repeatedly describes herself and this work as messy, which is an apt assessment. “I seem to just keep talking (or writing in this case) and hoping someone gets a sense of me that way,” she writes. In recalling a failed romance, Strong is vague and circumspect: “I accepted a lot. I’m not proud. But I think the secrecy and shame is part of why you get stuck in really bad places. In an abusive relationship. So here are empty pages.” There follow 12 blank pages. Her affection for Owen, however, clearly comes through.

There’s no lack of emotion in Strong’s voice, but the delivery mostly falls flat.