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 book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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