Here’s another book club selection. It’s a book Radner wrote, mainly about her battle with cancer. There are a few flashbacks to her childhood and earlier life, but the book really covers the period from 1981, when she met Gene Wilder, who would become her husband, until 1988, when the book ends with her in an ambiguous moment of not really knowing whether she’s going to recover from the current flare-up of cancer or not. Of course, we all know she didn’t, which lends the slightly hopeful tone of the final chapter a somewhat melancholy feeling. Anyway, I didn’t particularly like the book. It’s just really poorly written; Radner, if she did write this, needed a ghostwriter very badly. Or maybe she had a ghostwriter and that’s the one to blame for the flat, annoying prose. While her story is an engaging one, I found the prose to be so bad that it was literally a struggle to make myself keep reading the book. She has some, not altogether new, ideas about living your life fully, etc., and the book is ultimately life affirming, even if some of the descriptions of her treatments are striking in just how backwards cancer treatment still was as recently as the eighties. But, on the whole, it’s a book I didn’t enjoy the experience of in any way and it’s a book I simply have to recommend against. You guys, I cannot express how awful this writing is. Seriously. Bad read. Warned against. 1 star.
tl;dr – story of comedienne’s battle with cancer could be compelling, but dreadful writing absolutely sinks the entire enterprise. 1 star.