See You When I See You
A Tragi-comic Memoir
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4.2 • 30 Ratings
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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.
Customer Reviews
Please, stop feeding the narcissist.
Finally, the tragedy that Adam always needed in order to justify his unjustifiable brooding and narcissism against his lifetime of excessive privilege and inheritance. He was quoted in The Atlantic as saying, “Maybe this was her gift to me.” How fitting that the book he always wanted to write would ultimately be a wild capitalization upon the loss of his little sister. Disgusting.