Funny Is as Funny Does: Book Review of Life Will Be the Death of Me:...and You Too! by Chelsea Handler

 

Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and You Too! by Chelsea Handler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Chelsea Handler is hilarious, and I could hear her sardonic voice as I read Life Will the Death of Me:...and You Too! In this memoir, Handler tells how the trauma of the Trump election lead her to therapy, which brought her to confront the trauma of her childhood: when she was nine and her oldest brother was twenty-two, he died in a hiking accident. Her family struggled under heavy grief, and as she describes it, they never quite came together again.

Handler discusses more than just her brother dying—there’s also drugs, her climb to the top, privilege, her dogs, and of course, drugs. A significant amount of time is spent discussing marijuana, as Handler recounts using pot as a sedative as well as trying a slew of varieties so she could settle on one for her designer line (California made recreational marijuana use legal in 2016).

Her dogs, supposedly Chow mixes (although this doesn’t hold under DNA testing) are her closest companions and the closest thing she has to caring for another individual.

While her book takes some side trips, Life Will Be the Death of Me:...and YouToo! does create an overarching narrative based on Handler’s journey through the coping strategies she developed in order to deal with her brother’s death and how they manifested in her adult life. Reading the book, I could not help but wonder how the pandemic impacted Handler’s ongoing pursuit of self-understanding and improvement. Did her forays into being more self-sufficient serve her well? Was she able to continue growing her empathy? Were her dogs able to abide the additional attention?

Would I teach this book? While I did find it quite funny and I was mostly satisfied with the narrative, there are so many amazingly written memoirs out there, many of them equally as funny.

More problematic from my standpoint as a reader was that it seemed that Handler had made all her revelations before writing the book, which made the writing feel as though it were a recounting or reporting and not a further probing or exploration of her discoveries. As Robert Frost said, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” While I would not teach the whole book, if I were teaching a memoir or creative nonfiction class to college students, I would consider teaching a chapter from the beginning and a chapter from the end as a demonstration of how a memoirist can discuss changes made to their behaviors and self-conception.

And—while I love dogs, there is something that feels a little too self-indulgent in spending so much time discussing your pets without fully considering how it applies to old behaviors and beliefs.

Still, Life Will Be the Death of Me:...and You Too! Is entertaining, in part because it has emotional  substance.

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