LIFE WILL BE THE DEATH OF ME

A presidential election, a midlife
crisis, and psychiatric therapy bring some revelation to the author and perhaps
a turning point as well.

Handler (Uganda Be Kidding Me, 2014, etc.) is at a
crossroads. She has become the embodiment of the sort of elitist entitlement
that she fears helped elect a president she hates. She also seems burdened by
what she previously might have considered blessings, living a bubblelike
existence with assistants to deal with her every command and inconvenience and few
significant responsibilities. “I have the Trump family and their vampiric
veneers and horrifying personalities to thank for my midlife crisis,” she
writes of the anger and emptiness she felt amid a successful life. She had
conquered the comedy circuit, the TV screen, and the bestseller lists, but it
no longer seemed enough in the wake of a national crisis. But what could she
do? As it became obvious that her inner turmoil ran deeper than Trump, she finally
sought therapy. “I was forty-two when I finally saw a real psychiatrist,” she
writes, providing an exhaustive account of her therapy that includes pages of
re-created dialogue. Handler also details the traumas that have shaped her,
mainly the death of her brother when she was 9 and, later, the death of each
parent, whom she had loved with such ambivalence and grieved differently than what
she thought was expected. Her brother has remained fixed in her memory as the
first man who broke her heart, and rather than experience such heartbreak again,
she has found deeper, more meaningful relationships with her dogs, who provide
much of the comic relief in the text. When her therapist advised, “you have
been a human doing, and we need to get you to be a human being,” she winced at
the banality. But by the end, she matches him with, “wake up. Take a nap. Laugh.
Cry. Rinse. Repeat.”