Standing Up: A Memoir of a Funny (Not Always) Life
At 42, Grodin, daughter of actor Charles Grodin, does what comes naturally: be funny. During one of the worst days of her life—she had finished a bout of brutal cancer treatments, she had gained a tremendous amount of weight, and her husband had just moved out—she finds joy making people laugh at the annual Kennedy gala in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. Grodin riffs on what it is like to be a child of Hollywood and on life in Manhattan after her parents divorced. She name-drops the famous people in father’s circle: a Woody Allen here, a Paul Simon there, a Jeff Bridges there. But this is mostly a memoir about self-doubt and insecurity as she recounts her battles with addictions to drugs and food. Adrift in the world, Grodin tries to find her way back to some sort of normality, first as a sitcom writer and eventually as a stand-up comic, something, she writes, “I’d been wanting to do my whole life.” A funny, sad, and ultimately triumphant tale of finding one’s true self. --June Sawyers