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4.04 AVERAGE
4.04 AVERAGE
A person as beautiful and marvelous and genuine as Gilda did not deserve to suffer through such a horrific disease. No one does. I have chosen not to give her heart-wrenching memoir a star rating, as it feels inappropriate to put a rating on her experience. In the almost 30 years that she’s been gone, I hope she knows that she hasn’t been forgotten. Even more so, I hope she knows that young people who were born years after her passing, such as myself, grew up looking to her as a role model and inspiration. She will always be one of the people I admire most. Gilda, you are missed beyond words.
funny
inspiring
sad
medium-paced
This is one of the most confusingly hilarious and vulnerable memoirs I've ever read. Gilda Radner was a national treasure.
In a funny, thought-provoking and poignant description of her war on cancer, Gilda Radner's lays bare her frustration, anger, and tantrums, but also her love, joy and hope. Although her fight was not a full victory, her story definitely is.
"There are no guarantees. There are no promises, but there is you, and strength inside to fight for recovery. And always there is hope."
This is not about Gilda Radner. This is about Gilda Radner's entire medical history and her ovarian cancer, up until approximately the year before she died. I was not aware of this until I actually started reading the book... the funny thing is, she weaves in chapters and passages about her earlier life, almost as if, while she was battling cancer, she was constantly reminded of things that had happened earlier, things that tied all her experiences together. It was a very unique way of writing a memoir, in my opinion. I also appreciate that Gilda, in this book, didn't paint herself as a survivor or an angelic invalid; instead, she was crabby, she was cranky, she was a giant mess. She was human. It was nice to see her as a human reflected in her own words, instead of a more glamorized version of her, like you get with so many eulogies.
Gilda is the best. She is so, so funny, but it never feels like she's trying to tell you a joke (which is how I felt reading, say, Bossypants.) She just has the best, most natural, funniest way of telling stories, even really horrible ones about cancer and sickness. It was hard reading this knowing she was going to die of the cancer that she, at that point, had survived, and that definitely made it a sadder book than it probably was when it came out. But it's still delightfully funny, and I also think it gave me really good insight into what it's like to have cancer. Wonderful book.