In a HUGE victory for Obamacare, I just rubbed my firm nude bottom on the window of a crowded coffee shop.
— rob delaney (@robdelaney) November 6, 2013
Katie Rogers reviews prolific Twitter-comic Rob Delaney‘s new book, Rob Delaney: Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage:
The book – we’ll call it ‘MWSHWFYTC’ – is a speed read that takes the reader from Delaney’s native Marblehead, Massachusetts in the early 1990s to present-day Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife and two sons. The years in between, though, are where Delaney’s prose is at its most powerful. The comical (if dangerous) bouts of binge drinking suddenly crash into Delaney’s rock bottom, which involves a hospital, rehab and a halfway house.
Many pages of his book are strewn with profanity, fart jokes or comments about genitalia; you’ll finish the book knowing more about his personal evolution in masturbatory habits than his courtship with his wife. The language is stronger than the typical memoir of triumph over struggle, but then again, not every writer can weave body fluids and body parts into a touching essay about a battle with depression, or three halfway house buddies who never made it out. Those vignettes bookending his battles are less engaging, but Delaney’s unflinching description of addiction and depression should be required reading for those who’ve ever struggled with either disease.
A sample from the book:
At the end of my freshman year I fell asleep on my roommate’s bed when he was out of town. I’d taken a girl to a screening of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and I’d struck out. So I convinced my other roommates to drink ten or fifteen beers with me, then passed out in his bed instead of my own and pissed in it thoroughly. When I woke up and realized what had happened, I sprang into action.
I washed his comforter, sheets, and mattress pad. Then I dried them and, in the process, melted his mattress pad. Great holes were seared into it, all over, but I put it on his bed anyway with the sheets and comforter over it. When he got back to the dorms, lay down on his bed, and felt the crunchy mattress pad under him, he pulled the sheets off and asked the heavens, “What the fuck?”
Rather than admit I’d passed out on his bed and irrigated it, I told him, “Sometimes mattress pads melt under your sheets when it gets hot.” I don’t know if he believed this, but we didn’t speak of it again, and we went to our respective homes for the summer a few days later. He’s a bank vice president now, as is another of our suitemates, with whom I smoked pot regularly through a hose that hooked up to a Vietnam-era gas mask that we would take turns strapping to our faces.
In an interview at Slate, Delaney explains why, despite the idea of the tortured artist, “depression itself is not a good thing for comedy”:
I remain under a psychiatrist’s care. I took antidepressants this morning. I’ll take them tomorrow morning. But because I don’t drink, because I take that medication, because I exercise and eat reasonably well and try to live my life and try to be a kind person and a compassionate person and a hardworking person, my base level happiness generally is pretty average to high. I’m still a weirdo. If they did an autopsy on me, it wouldn’t surprise me if parts of my brain they could look at and think, “Whoa … this is … OK, here we are. This explains some things.” Just because I’ve been sober for over 11 years, and just because I don’t put my fist through a wall every other week like I did when I was drinking, and just because I’m not destroying relationships, doesn’t mean that I’m not still in some ways the same nutjob.
It’s OK to be crazy. It’s OK to wrestle with negative urges. I wouldn’t feel guilty if I had the thought, “Hey, I’d love a beer right now.” There’s nothing wrong with me because I feel that way. But if I go have that beer, that would be a problem, because that would likely lead to 23 more and a fireball somewhere. I try to think it through now and weigh the consequences. And I’ve achieved peace with the fact that yeah, I’m a drunk, and that’s OK. The only thing bad about me being a drunk would be not acknowledging it.
The Dish 