Droll wit and profundity swirl together in a revealing memoir from a successful comedy writer.
A producer and comedy writer for 2 Broke Girls and The King of Queens, among other programs, brings her humor to the homefront with these essays about her childhood and raising her own children.
Given Astrof’s extensive background in comedy, readers will expect humor throughout, and the author delivers with one punchline after another. The author clearly loves her children, but she prefers to leave the details of raising them to her husband. She shares a wide, wacky variety of stories: how she avoids returning home until she knows her kids are safely tucked in bed, how she handled a weekend at Great Wolf Lodge, an indoor water park where signs warned swimmers not to enter the pool with “active” diarrhea (“I could only speculate as to what ‘active’ meant to the legal team…but mostly, I was grateful that I wouldn’t have to so much as dip a toe in that shit river”), how she reacted when her stash of candy dissolved while on vacation in Mexico; why she is convinced she’ll be murdered while on a work-related weekend with fellow writers; why a “fun” trip to the mall with her kids is anything but; and how an idyllic vacation in Hawaii turned into a fiasco thanks to one errant text message. Underneath the comedy, however, are details about the author’s difficult childhood living with verbally abusive parents who fought over her custody. She also grew up with weight and self-esteem issues and still has trouble with both concerns as an adult. The juxtaposition between the absurdity and the reality of Astrof’s life creates a mostly effective balance, which pushes this book beyond the slapstick visible at the surface and into a more reflective realm.
Droll wit and profundity swirl together in a revealing memoir from a successful comedy writer.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982106-95-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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