Tragedy Plus Time
A Tragi-comic Memoir
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- €13.99
Publisher Description
Now a major motion picture directed by award-winning filmmaker, actor, and producer Jay Duplass, See You When I See You is Adam Cayton-Holland’s “heartbreaking work of genius” (Booklist), a memoir about loss, family, mental health, and the comedian’s relationship with his younger sister, who took her own life.
Unsentimental, unexpectedly funny, and incredibly honest, See You When I See You is a moving love letter to every family that has ever felt messy, complicated, or (even momentarily) magnificent.
Meet the Magnificent Cayton-Hollands, three brilliant, acerbic teenagers from Denver, Colorado, who were going to change the world. Anna, Adam, and Lydia were taught by their father, a civil rights lawyer, and mother, an investigative journalist, to open their hearts to the universe—the good, the bad, the heartbreaking (and, inadvertently, the anxiety-inducing and the obsessive-compulsive disorder–fueling).
Adam chose to meet life’s injustices with stand-up comedy; his older sister, Anna, chose law; their youngest sister, Lydia, struggled to find her place. When depression overwhelms Lydia, Adam’s best efforts can’t pull her out of the darkness. When she takes her own life, Adam throws himself into his stand-up, drinking, and rage, and soon realizes there's a difference between losing and losing it.
“Inspiring, tragic, and at times heartrendingly funny” (People), Adam's tribute to a lost sibling takes you to the edges of comedy and tragedy, brilliance and madness.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Comedian Adam Cayton-Holland's tragicomic memoir chronicles his childhood and his early years on the stand-up circuit—and the shadow cast by his younger sister Lydia's suicide. Staying true to the aphorism that provides the book's title (“comedy is tragedy plus time”), Cayton-Holland leavens his grief with jokes that may hit a raw nerve for readers with fresh emotional wounds of their own. But that dark humor, like the book’s more poignant moments, is clearly rooted in a deep wellspring of familial love. Those who cope with emotional burdens by making light of them will find Cayton-Holland a kindred spirit.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Self-mockery and true pathos make for a powerful mixture in this nuanced memoir about a comedian's alternately blessed and crushingly tragic family history. At first, it seems like there's little about Cayton-Holland's life that would evoke sympathy: raised in Denver by a pair of idealistic parents, the author and his two sisters (whom he refers to as the "Magnificent Cayton-Hollands") come off as a family that makes others envious, overflowing as they are with well-nurtured talent and densely layered inside jokes. Cayton-Holland is a costar and cocreator of the sitcom Those Who Can't, and the book opens with a scene of his L.A. showbiz success that feels almost scripted. But while he and one of his sisters found professional success (the sister is a lawyer), their younger sister Lydia struggled with mental illness. Visiting home after a work trip to Montreal, Cayton-Holland checked on Lydia; when she didn't answer her phone the next morning, he drove to her house and discovered that she had killed herself. Cayton-Holland's wry and wiry voice here elegantly transitions from half-cynical stand-up pose to thoughtful interpretation of the contradictions of grief ("I like to remember her constantly; I try not to think of her at all") without losing a beat. This is a vivid and heartbreaking account of two bright lives, one blessed with hard-fought success and one cut painfully short.
