I'd Rather Laugh by Linda Richman, Rosie O'Donnell
Reviews Richman, mother-in-law of comedian Mike Myers and lecturer at the Canyon Ranch spa in Arizona, comes across as an acquaintance you can only take in small doses. She has indeed had a tough life: she lost her father at age eight and her mother to hospitalization shortly thereafter; her husband was a compulsive gambler, and her son died in a car accident. However, after a few chapters, it starts to sound as if she is making excuses for her own behavior. The writing is disjointed, rambling, and raging, and it reads as if she wrote this for a personal cleansing, relieving and reliving her shock and anger. Despite the title, the emotions are still near the surface and raw. All in all, she has three ideas worth investigating: a pity party, where you allow yourself to grieve; the skill of catastrophizing; and listening to your own red flags of impending depression. Do you need a book to tell you this? she asks. This reader says no. However, she'll be a hit on talk shows, and therefore public libraries will get requests. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/00.]DSusan E. Burdick, MLS, Reading, PA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information. Yes, there's a real woman behind Mike Myers's Coffee Talk caricature Linda Richman?his mother-in-law, now a lecturer at the Canyon Ranch spa. And has she got some stories! There's one about her nutcase mother. who refused to tell eight-year-old Linda that her father had died, instead claiming he had just gone away, and another about Richman's marriage to a compulsive gambler. She also tells of the agoraphobia that kept her in her apartment for 11 years, and of the accidental death of her beloved 29-year-old son. The point of Richman's earthy, funny and sensible book is that she transcended these traumas?though not without a little wackiness, such as her one-time habit of shocking total strangers by telling them that her son has died. Amid her anecdotes about a foray into multispiritualism (aka Lindaism), her technique for eliciting group sob stories at Canyon Ranch (put on Groucho masks) and recommendations of tearjerkers like Terms of Endearment (the nuclear weapon of dead children cinema), she offers some good, if hardly original, advice. Among her nuggets: go see a therapist; when it comes to relatives who can't provide sanity and support, try to accept whatever good is there and ignore the rest; pain doesn't go away, but it can dim with time; once you give a gift or give help, accept that you have no say in how it's used. Agent, Richard Pine. (Feb.) Forecast: If Richman is as endearingly entertaining in person as this book and her over-the-top son-in-law, Mike Myers, suggest, her three-city author tour and 25-city TV satellite tour should propel hearty sales. Simultaneous Time Warner audio. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
Publication Details
Title:
Author(s):
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Binding: Paperback
Published by: Pan Macmillan: , 2001
Edition:
ISBN: 9780732910761 | 0732910765
223 pages.
Book Condition: Good
Cover worn
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