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The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee
The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee
The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee
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The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

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About this ebook

Warning from publisher to reader:

At HarperCollins, we are committed to customer satisfaction. Before proceeding, please take the following questionnaire to determine your likelihood of enjoying this book:

1. Which of the following do you appreciate?

(a) Women with somewhat horse-ish facial features.
(b) Women who, while not super Jew-y, are more identifiably Jewish than, say, Natalie Portman.
(c) Frequent discussion of unwanted body hair.

2. Are you offended by the following behavior?

(a) Instructing one's grandmother to place baked goods in her rectal cavity.
(b) Stripping naked in public—eleven times in a row.
(c) Stabbing one's boss in the head with a writing implement.

3. The best way to treat an emotionally fragile young girl is:

(a) Murder the main course of her Thanksgiving dinner before her very eyes.
(b) Tell her that her older sister is prettier than she, and then immediately die.
(c) Prevent her suicide by recommending she stay away from open windows.

If you read the above questions without getting nauseous or forming a hate Web site, you are ready to read this book! Please proceed.

Editor's Note

Artfully distasteful…

Tripping on acid with Louis C.K., suicidal therapists, and a lot of bedwetting: everything you would want from a book by the acclaimed Jewess of comedy, Sarah Silverman.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateApr 20, 2010
ISBN9780061987076
Author

Sarah Silverman

Sarah Silverman is the co-creator and star of The Sarah Silverman Program. She won an Emmy in 2009 for her video I'm F***ing Matt Damon, and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy for her role on The Sarah Silverman Program. Silverman lives in Los Angeles with her dog, Duck, presuming he does not die prior to publication, which is moderately to extremely likely.

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Sara tells of her life growing up and then getting into stand up and her own show. I found the largest part of the book fairly entertaining and sometimes was even laughing out loud. Near the end of the book it started to drag for me when she started talking about her show and politics etc. But all in all a fun easy read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I've been reading a lot of funny memoirs lately, but Silverman takes the cake. It seems wrong to describe her humor as "subtle" since she's so over the top, but that's exactly what I'd say about this book. Instead of showcasing the joke in each paragraph, Silverman tucks one into each sentence so you read over it and are laughing before you realize what the joke was. When you read over the sentence, you're cracking up for a good five minutes before you can continue on. It's a straight-forward memoir, starting, appropriately, with her childhood problem of wetting the bed and continuing on to her teenage problem of wetting the bed. We're right along with her as she breaks into comedy, still occasionally wetting the bed.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Apparently, I should have watched a little more of Sarah Silverman on TV before I undertook reading her memoir. I knew she could be very funny, but I didn't know a lot about her.And she is very funny – if you have the sense of humor more common in 12-year old boys. To me, she never outgrew that stage in babies where they become enamored with their own bodily functions and emissions. What do you expect of someone whose father taught her to swear, and quite graphically, at age 3. In the foreword (which she claims to be groundbreaking in itself), she states, “Tragically, my life has been only moderately [expletive, one of many] up. Actually, she did have some life-changing incidents, and adding being a habitual bedwetter only added to that. At a sleepover, “What kind of person reacts to a child's wet pajamas with rage and no compassion?” And when she wore a jean jacket to a upscale friend's house, the friend's mother made the friend repeat to Sarah the comment, “only scumbags wear jean jackets.” Or perhaps, only scumbags denigrate a child's clothing.So yes, people were mean. And yes, Sarah is funny. But I got really tired of the memoir when it became little other than tasteless jokes and pranks. And while I'm not easily offended at some bad language, this one was beyond the pale for me.I read this ebook through a Kindle Unlimited subscription.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Road trip! 2,500-mile round trip taking my daughter to college and driving back alone calls for a whole lot of audiobooks. (2 of 7)Hilarious! I loved watching The Sarah Silverman Program and her various stand-up specials, and this audiobook is just as great. Her chapter titles alone set off giant rolls of laughter.Silverman's style of humor is not for everyone as she pushes boundaries way past the realm of good taste. Her chapter on defense of a joke involving ethnic slurs was discomfiting even as it raised some legitimate if debatable points about humor and free speech.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    From my Cannonball Read 5 review ...

    This is the second audiobook I’ve ‘read’ for the Cannonball Read. Sticking with my idea of listening to female comic memoirs read by the authors, I picked The Bedwetter. I chose it with a bit of trepidation, as while I’ve found myself laughing at some of Sarah Silverman’s work, I recalled that she’s said some things that left a bad taste in my mouth. In general I think people are pretty torn on Sarah Silverman. They either find her funny or find her annoying / inappropriate. After listening to this memoir I’m definitely more of a fan of her work.

    The book has a very sincere tone to it without being annoying. She sounds like herself, but not like a character version of herself, if that makes sense. Whether it was an act or not, I imagined that this is what she’d sound like talking to her friends. She shares some stories that would clearly be mortifying for a child or teenager, making her quite relatable, and sheds some light onto both the world of making a sitcom-style show and working at Saturday Night Live as a writer.

    I think my favorite parts were where she discussed jokes she’s told that were not well received. Probably the best-known instance of this was when she was on Conan O’Brien and made a joke that used a racial slur for Asian people. Many people I know would probably stop listening there, but I was in the middle of a run and so didn’t really have a choice. And by that point I’d also felt like I’d invested enough in the book to want to hear her discussion of it. You know what? It was a very interesting, well-thought out discussion. Yes, she is a comic who make jokes about poo, but she’s also a thoughtful person interested in social commentary.

    The audio book is about six hours in length, so just long enough for me to listen to it over about a week’s worth of runs. I’m glad I purchased it instead of borrowing it from the library because it’s the kind of book I could see myself listening to again in the future.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I'm not the Sarah Silverman fan in the family, my son is. My thought process in buying the book was that although I'm not a fan of her television show I do appreciate a humorous memoir, so I hoped that as a comedian she would write a funny book. My thoughts were incorrect. I don't find her funny, even on paper. My son might appreciate the book but I just don't get her and nothing in this book even made me crack a smile.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    funny and interesting.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Although this isn't the profound work of depth that the excerpt about Sarah Silverman's childhood bedwetting problem that I previously read in The Guardian led me to believe it could be, this was still a fairly enjoyable summary of her life so far and some of the author's beliefs and ideals.This book jumps around from different points in Silverman's life, which can be a little confusing and annoying and there were many times when it felt like it was written by two different people; 1) an author who did want to give an insightful account of significant moments in her life and 2) a comedian who wanted to prove just how wacky and wild she and her peers are and have been in their endeavours to be funny and clever and famous. I preferred the more insightful author, though I accept that Sarah's often crude sense of humour was obviously going to affect the style of this book.That said, I do feel that I got to know the person behind the jokes a bit more and what I found, I actually did like. When she's not telling fart jokes, Sarah Silverman does come across as someone who does care about other people's feelings, of all races and genders and sexual persuasions, and is trying to use her humour in an ironic way to open up the minds of others. For that I do give her credit and after reading this book I am a bit more willing to try watching some of her material that I previously dismissed.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    not very funny.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Not sure how she gets away with everything she writes about, but Sarah is hilarious. Possibly the funniest female comic working today
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The first half of the book tells a great story, a surprising story with great humor. In that respect the book was much better than expected. She includes a "midword" where she discusses how much time she wasted writing the book then proves it with random pieces, that are at time lousy. After the sixth reference to the, "funniest guy ever!" that she works with it gets boring.She does talk about her insecurities in the well written bio portion of the book and that trait shines through. Some of her explanations for controversial jokes ring hollow and unbelievable. It is very hard to believe she didn't know Paris Hilton was going to be in the audience when one of the jokes was made. But it impossible to believe she was having goodhearted fun with Britney Spears only a few months later. The jokes were mean, brutal, and hilarious. But, Sarah Silverman wants to be the mean C-word on stage and avoid the fallout. Grow a pair Sarah.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This book is kind of like Sarah's standup. Not for the easily offended, it is often gross and offensive with a lot of penis and fart references. But, occasionally she comes out with a gem that is freakin' hilarious. My favorite quote from the book: "What the hell do I need a man for anyway? Everything that I enjoy, I seem to be able to do with two hands, a fork, and an iPhone."
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Surprisingly decent autobiography with minimal doses of typical Sarah gross-out humor. Best line: "Summer camp - a Jew's second least favorite kind of camp..."
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    It was so-so. I liked the first part of the book when she talks of her childhood and family life, especially since she was originally from the area. As she gets to the part of her career picking up, i lost interest a bit. Mostly because I didnt know the people she was talking about.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Started this out of curiosity as I had no idea what it was about or even who Sarah Silverman is. I kept on asking myself why I was bothering, but did persevere to the end. It is Sarah's autobiography telling the story of her childhood and then breaking into the comedy world. It is quite an amusing look at life in the US comedy world but as she herself says you don't know how much is exaggerated for effect.
    I think if you are a fan of hers, you would enjoy it otherwise don't bother.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Overall an enjoyable and compelling listen. Silverman's brand of comedy has never particularly appealed to me since I don't really find pedophilia or rape a hoot. That said I have always enjoyed interviews with her, and have found compelling the intellectual rigor she brings to a fart joke. I enjoyed her analysis of her craft, her document of her professional and personal journey and her solid defense of her subversive brand of racial and ethnic humor.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    some parts really good, some silly like sarah's comedy
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I found Silverman's tone to be cloying and forced. I can't see why people find her funny.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Funny blurbs about her life that had laugh out loud moments. Nothing amazing but a few stories made the time worth it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Sarah Silverman's book is as raunchy, crass, adorable, and hilarious as she is. From the very beginning, when she writes her own forward, you know this is not going to be your average memoir. As a comedian, Sarah has been known to push boundaries, sometimes offending people with her satire; this book gives her an opportunity to answer back and explain herself. She also reveals interesting tidbits about her childhood, giving the reader a more clear picture of how her sense of humor was formed and why she seems to have no fear. A bit of warning, though, this book is for fans. If you don't like Sarah and/or her humor, you will not have a more positive view of her after reading this book. I find it admirable when a writer is able to display herself as she is, instead of trying to present herself in a more favorable light, but she sometimes comes across as arrogant and bad-natured.Overall, very satisfying to those who appreciate and respect Ms Silverman's work.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Dick jokes abound and anyone who knows me knows I love it. Really though, Silverman came off much more intelligent and sensitive and thoughtful than I ever would have guessed. Also she is hilarious when she's not making dick jokes.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Good Fun. Worth the read.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This started off great -- funny, well-written, touching... which lasted for about maybe a third of the book. Then it started jumping around in time and turned into an odd assortment of jarring anecdotes. As a former bedwetter and a fan of fart jokes, I can relate to Silverman on a lot of different levels, and I'd recommend this to any former bedwetter. Or current bedwetter: sometimes, it does get better.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Sarah never takes anything seriously, including her own memoirs, and that is what made this book so enjoyable.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Witty and repulsive. Silverman's trademark humor colors the tales of her youth, failures, and success.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Interesting to learn of her upbringing in New Hampshire as a Jew. She's got a real chip on her shoulder about that, and about being hairy.There's a picture of her wearing a pink dress that made me open my right eye real wide.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I finished reading this autobiography - true story! - while waiting my turn at the urologist's office. I always bring reading material. You never know how much time it will take for the doctor to put his finger on exactly what is wrong with the prostate of the fellow in front of you. Anyhow, I thought it was a witty choice for the waiting room. But many of my fellow patients - elderly East Ohioans with walkers - likely had never heard of Sarah Silverman. No doubt I was telling them more than they wanted to know...deeply engrossed, as I was, in The Bedwetter. I was pretty much in love with Ms. Silverman before reading her bio. Now? I plan to stalker her! (just kidding) She's a physical doppelganger for a Jewish girlfriend I loved madly back in the 1970's. Uncannily, their names are similar, alliterative and share the same root.. Even their humor... for example, I cite the time my friend's dog, Rufus, mistook her used tampon for a milkbone - a fact we discovered only days later when Ruuufus appeared to be turning into a white furry firecracker with a string fuse just below his tail.If you're a fan of Sarah Silverman, may God help you and have mercy on your soul...no seriously, I'm joking...you will enjoy this book. She's precious. She's cute. She's absolutely disgusting. And it's not her fault, she was molested by Andrew Dice Clay...no seriously, I'm joking..SHE molested him. No really...you will enjoy her humiliating tale upon tale of bedwetting. The time she almost killed a future US Senator with a pencil. Her epic Struggles with Editors, Censors, Publishers, and legions of decencies. The Eternal Question of poetic judgement "To Pee or To Pee-pee which sounds better?". The Diary that talks back. And, last but not least, a long loving glimpse of her Dad's many messages on her answering machine. Those messages- they're not Steven Baldwin...but they're not fuckin' boring either, bubby.Run out. Buy this book. Program your soul. Eternity is all about choices and will come down to picking one of two long bunny hop lines. One behind Sarah Palin and one behind Sarah Silverman. Don't get it wrong.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Candid, honest, sweet, hilarious, and real. This shows that Sarah Silverman is not just poop jokes (which if you watch her show, you already know that). She is an amazingly smart woman who is just laugh out loud funny. A great look behind the scenes of her career and inside her head. Don't read without a sense of humor or if you are easily offended.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I always enjoy Sarah Silverman's work and this book is no exception. Lots of laughs but beware, her humor tends to be a little on the raw side.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An interesting book if you like comedy. Also interesting autobiography of an American woman. It held my interest throughout with stories from growing up to behind the scenes on her show. It was uplifting to learn about the life of a genuine unique person and I did chuckle a few times reading this book. There was one chapter that seemed like she was ACTUALLY stoned while writing it near the end. I neither use nor condone drug use but that was my favorite chapter. Sarah Silverman is a likable character and I cared about her struggles. She did come across as a bit self obsessed but that is part of being any kind of performer and particularly a comic. Wanted to learn more about her but I guess it is her life so far and as candid as she was in this book, as far as shock value is concerned, anything she decided to omit in that category, must be beyond imagining. Worth reading.

Book preview

The Bedwetter - Sarah Silverman

CURSED FROM THE START


My Life Started by Exploding Out of My Father’s Balls, and You Wonder Why I Work Blue


Like most children, I learned to swear from a parent. But most children learn to swear by mimicking moments when a parent loses self-control. That is typically followed by the parent stressing that such words are bad and shouldn’t be repeated outside the home. When I was three years old, I learned to swear from my father, but he taught me with every intention to do so. It was like he was teaching a cursing as a second language course for one.

Bitch! Bastard! Damn! Shit! I proclaimed with joy, if not necessarily wit, in the middle of Boys’ Market in Manchester, New Hampshire. Random shoppers stopped in the aisle, and watched me with delight—or at least curiosity—as I regurgitated this mantra. Dad stood by with genuine pride, beaming through the mock surprise on his face.

Dad and me circa 1975. I believe we were laughing at a comment I made about how his nipple is reminiscent of Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

My guess is that when something is so easy, so greatly rewarded, and bears so few negative consequences, it’s a recipe for addiction. From that moment on, everything I did was in search of that rush. So I guess I’m saying that I’m, in most ways, my father’s fault. He filled my mother’s vagina with the filthy semen that consisted of me, then filled my head with even more filth.

When I was four I sat coloring a piece of typing paper during a dinner party at my Nana and Papa’s house in Concord. It was a white ranch house perched on a hill with long concrete steps leading up to the front door. The living room had bright turquoise carpeting under a long white couch. A blue-and-white candy-filled bowl rested on a thick-glass coffee table. Nana, a fashionable woman in her late fifties, who rocked hot pink lipstick under a swirly mane of salt-and-pepper cotton candy, came out of the kitchen carrying a tray of her famous brownies.

Sarah, Nana made brownies for you! she beamed in the third person.

I looked up from my drawing, glanced over to my father, who gave me the nod, then turned to Nana.

Shove ’em up your ass, I said.

The tide of the guests’ laughter quickly swept away any anger Nana had toward Dad. She had to smile. Remembering this very early time makes me nostalgic for the days when naked obscenity was enough for a laugh, and didn’t need any kind of crafted punch line to accompany it. It was good to be four.

It strikes me that, in this story of a little girl telling her loving grandmother to shove baked goods up her ass, I might come across as a monster. But allow me to place this anecdote in a cultural context: It was the 1970s. Countless friends of mine who grew up in that decade tell stories of their parents giving them liquor, or pot, or buying them Playboy magazines, or letting their boyfriends sleep over at very young ages. Or having key parties and orgies while they believed their children were upstairs sleeping. Like oversexualized retarded adults, the 1970s had the distinction of being both naive and inappropriate. For a naive and inappropriate girl to be born from it, it’s really not so crazy.

What I said to my grandmother yielded a strange kind of glory, and I basked in it. The reactions were verbally disapproving, but there was an unmistakable encouragement under it all. No meant yes.


He Farts in the Face of Strangers


My father, Donald Silverman, is a black-haired, dark-skinned Jew who walks exactly like Bill Cosby dances. A little bounce with each step, elbows bent with hands dangling at the wrists on either side of his chest. When you see him approach, you might think, A ridiculous man is walking toward me. And you’d be right.

My dad is pretty much fearless, which makes him a natural showman and public speaker. He’s always the one asked to make a toast or a speech. But a perceived fearlessness can sometimes be mistaken for what is actually gall. This is clearly exemplified by my father’s willingness to steal all his material. He would lift bits from comedians, songs, sitcoms—anywhere—then tweak them to fit and claim them as his own. He once spoke at the Bar Mitzvah of his friend’s son David.

Today, David, I find in being Jewish a thing of beauty, a joy, a strength, a cup of gladness, a Jewish kingdom as wonderful as any other. Accept in full the sweetness of your Jewishness. David, be brave. Keep freedom in the family and do what you can to make the world a better place. Now may the Constitution of the United States go with you, the Declaration of Independence stand by you, the Bill of Rights protect you. And may your own dreams be your only boundaries henceforth now and forever. Amen.

Tears. Not a dry eye in the house. People flocked to Dad to tell him how moving and brilliant his words were. Evidently, they had never seen the play Purlie Victorious by Ossie Davis, because that’s where those words were first heard. On Broadway. Other than changing all the instances of black to Jew, my father stole the passage pretty much word for word.

My dad was born in Boston, Massachusetts, before moving to New Hampshire where his family settled. His Boston accent is as thick as a stack of ten lobsters and he is almost entirely impossible to understand. My sisters and I became adept at translating what he said into English. Caaah was car, shaht was short, etc. This was a good system, though one that occasionally backfired, causing us to say parker or sofer in places where he actually was pronouncing something accurately, like, Get your parka off the sofa. My father says fuckin’ the way people say, like or totally. He might say it in anger like the rest of the world, but what makes him special is he evokes it in everyday talk. I had such a fuckin’ great time. I’m such a fuckin’ lucky daddy. Or, referring to his favorite HBO series, "Is that Ahliss [Arli$$, the HBO classic] fuckin’ wild o’ah what?"

Happily, Dad found a career that perfectly suited his personality. He owned a store called Crazy Sophie’s Factory Outlet. Much like a certain Eddie of legend, who perceived the unlikely connection between psychiatric disorder and retail sales volume, Dad did his own radio ads as Crazy Donald. They were highly spirited—and like everything else that came from his mouth, unintelligible—pitches which went something like,

When I see the prices at the mawl I just want to vawmit. Hi. I’m Crazy Donald, Crazy Sophie’s husband.

Dad would list all the brands of jeans he had in his store—brands I’ve never since heard of, like Unicorn. At the end he would say either,

So, spend you-ah time at the mawl, spend you-ah money at Crazy Sophie’s!

or:

So if you cay-ah enough to buy the very best—but yo-uah too CHEAP, come to Crazy Sophie’s!

In fact, Dad was not Crazy Sophie’s husband. Sophie did not exist. He invented her. He wanted a woman’s name because he was selling women’s clothes. Dad’s mother, my Nana, Rose, yelled at him after he named the store, insisting, You named the store after my friend Sophie Moskowitz, and she will be very insulted! Dad insisted, I did not name the sto-ah aftah Sophie Moskowitz. If I named the sto-ah aftah Sophie Moskowitz, I would have named it Ugly Sophie’s. Classic.

When my father first came home from college, he sat my grandparents down to tell them some very serious news. They followed him quizzically into the living room, and from the bantam couch stared up at their nervous, pacing son.

I’m gay, he announced.

They sat stunned for a moment, and just as his mother started to cry he said,

Just kidding. I smoke.

Genius.

The neighbor’s dog was repeatedly shitting in our yard. For a common problem like that, there’s a sensible solution: to drop by the neighbor’s house and ask, Would you mind curbing your dog?

But Dad didn’t say a word to the neighbors. Instead, he got up in the middle of the night, gingerly maneuvered the feces onto a piece of cardboard—careful not to disturb its signature shape—tiptoed to the neighbor’s driveway, and transferred it onto the pavement just below the driver’s-side door of our neighbor’s car. It was worth it to him to be nearer to this canine excrement than one would ever need to be, in exchange for the possibility that our neighbor would step in his own dog’s shit on his way to work.

My parents were enjoying hot fudge sundaes at an ice cream parlor called Rumpelmayer’s in New York City. A man at the adjacent table was smoking. Since my mother was eight months pregnant (with my eldest sister, Susie), my father asked him if he’d put out his cigarette.

Fuck off, the man suggested.

My father kept his eyes trained on the man as he instructed my mother to go wait by the front door. He then sidled up to him as close as he could, lifted his leg, and twisted as he sang, "Puff on this," which was followed by the most putrid blast of human gas known to man at that time, and was not exceeded until the late ’80s by the great violinist Yo-Yo Ma.


The Reason I Am Not Completely Retarded


My mother, Beth Ann, is fair-skinned with green-blue eyes, soft brown hair, and a God-given nose most Jews would pay thousands for. She speaks beautifully and with great passion for proper grammar and pronunciation. Books—real books by fancy book writers—are read with pen in hand to correct typos and grammar mishaps—and she finds them. She’s a real-life Diane Chambers. She didn’t care if we said fuck or shit as long as it was with crisp diction and perfect pronunciation.

My mother, Beth Ann, in 1977

When we were kids she marched up to the counter of our local movie theater to complain that the voice on the recording (this is way before Moviefone) was so garbled she couldn’t make out what movies were playing. The guy just shrugged and said, "You wanna do it?" A star was born.

Mom would take me to the tiny room where the popcorn was stored. There were gigantic bags of pre-popped, yellowed, and packaged popcorn, taken out in increments and placed in the popcorn machine out front to simulate freshness (and also be heated by a lightbulb). The popcorn room was where she would tape the recording of the week’s movies, and here, she quietly put her values into practice. Giving such care to each word, her beautiful voice was clear and articulate with just a hint of whisper—like a Connecticut-born Julie Andrews. She expected from herself what she would expect from anyone: perfection. And she did those recordings over and over until she achieved it.

"Thank you for calling Bedford Mall Cinemas 1, 2, 3, and 4, where all bargain matinees are only two dollars Monday through Saturday. Now playing, Ordinary People, directed by Robert Redford!…"

Instead of a cash payment, we were all allowed to go to the movies for free, plus one, anytime we wanted.

In May of 1964, my mother-to-be (at this point she’s borne only my eldest sister, Susie) got on the game show Concentration, with Hugh Downs. She won the first two games, then came back the next day and won two more. When she repeated her success on day three she automatically became a contestant in that fall’s Challenge of Champions.

She remembers winning some SCUBA gear and that Hugh Downs asked her smugly if she knew that SCUBA was an acronym and what the letters stood for. She immediately answered, Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus? To which, according to my mother, he blanched and said a very small, Yes. She said she didn’t even know she knew that information until it came out of her mouth. She was twenty-three.

Among the stuff she won was:

a Triumph Spitfire sports car

a dozen leather handbags (all of them yellow)

a twenty-foot speedboat

a twenty-seven-foot party barge

two outboard motors for the boats

a mink stole

100 pounds of coffee

a dozen pairs of men’s pants

20 pairs of men’s shoes

a suite of living room furniture (some of which, forty-five years later, can still be found in the house I grew up in—a bachelor’s chest on my stepfather’s side of the bed, two maple end tables, and a large hassock in the living room)

and

a cruise to Bermuda

Other than those pieces of furniture and the fancy cruise, my parents sold the prizes for cash and with it bought their first house, in Manchester, New Hampshire. Since my mother was pregnant with kid number two, they decided to wait until a few months after the baby was born to take the cruise.


The First Time I Bombed


My parents’ second child, Jeffrey Michael Silverman, was born on February 9, 1965.

That May, Donald and Beth Ann went to New York City to take their cruise to Bermuda, after which they returned to New York to spend the weekend at the World’s Fair in Flushing, with their friends Ellie and Harry Bluestein before heading home to New Hampshire. Susie, who had just turned two, was staying with my mother’s parents in Connecticut, and the baby, Jeffrey, was in Concord with my father’s parents (Nana and Papa), Rose and Max. When they arrived at their hotel near the fairgrounds in Flushing, my father called his parents to check on Jeffrey.

My mother heard my father say, Gone? What do you mean, ‘gone’? Where is he?

She walked over to him, What’s going on?

He listened a few moments longer, then collapsed into tears, which curled into wails of despair. Jeffrey was dead.

Donald and Beth Ann arrived at the Concord house, where many friends had gathered around weeping, inconsolable Rose and Max. When Max looked up and saw my parents, he cried out, How can you forgive me?

My parents were told that Jeffrey had been crying a lot during the night and that Papa was the one to keep checking on him, since Nana was hard of hearing and couldn’t hear him cry. In the morning Papa got up and went to look in on the baby. He got to the crib and didn’t see him. He called to Nana, saying, Rose, where’s the baby? Then they both found him, down in one corner of the port-a-crib. The metal support frame had slipped off its peg, allowing a little narrow space between the mattress and the bottom rail of the crib. My parents were told that he had strangled in that space.

Any concept of closure, if it existed in the ’60s at all, was a notion invented by hippie fruits. My parents’ friends cleaned up any sign of Jeffrey’s existence by the time they got home. He was imagined.

In 1976 I was five and cute as a really hairy button. My eldest sister, Susie, was twelve. She was fair with very long dark brown hair and big brown sad eyes reflecting a heartbreaking need for love—by any means necessary.

Sweet Susie

When I was three she would babysit me and say, If I drink this orange juice I’m gonna turn into a monster!

I’d cry, Susie no! But she drank the juice anyway, went into the closet where the washer-dryer was, put a brown suede ski mask on her head, and came back out, monstrafied.

"RAAAAARGH!! The only way I’ll turn back to Susie is if you hug me!!!"

Terrified, I ran in a burst toward the monster, hugging her, eyes clenched.

Susie once pulled a steak knife out of the silverware drawer, turned to me, and mused, "It’s so weird, like, I could kill you right now. Like, I wouldn’t, but I could. I could just take your life…" One way to interpret this is that it foretold her eventual future as a rabbi. At age fourteen, here she was, already pondering the biggest issues of the human condition—life, death, morality, and the choices we must make. An alternate interpretation is that living with me eventually causes one to contemplate murder. But I’m feeling the former explanation is the right one, as it is a scientific certainty that I’m pretty adorable.

Laura, a.k.a. Mowgli

Laura was in the middle. She was eleven. A tomboy, she looked just like Mowgli from The Jungle Book.

She had olive skin with bright green almond-shaped eyes, and dimples on either side of her perfect smile. A lot went on inside her, which she mostly kept to herself. She was popular, smart, and could play any instrument she picked up without a single lesson.

We moved from Manchester, the biggest city in New Hampshire, to Bedford, New Hampshire—a small town of about twelve thousand people. We lived on a big lot of land—an old farm with a big barn where we would spend our summer days playing. One afternoon, Susie sat us down and told us the story of our brother, Jeffrey. She spoke with the measure and

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