A Carlin Home Companion

May 11, 2015
The home life of legendary countercultural comedian George Carlin was a barrel of laughs, drugs, and dysfunctions, according to this wry, raw memoir by his only child. Kelly Carlin, a radio host and monologist, recounts her parents’ devotion to booze, weed, cocaine, and pills; their multiple arrests for obscenity, drug possession, and DUI; and her mother’s near-death from alcoholism. Carlin also describes the electric aura of fame surrounding her father and the shadow it threw on her and her mother, as well as his miscellaneous psychotic breaks, including the time George urgently warned family and friends that the sun had exploded. The legacy for the author was an incredibly lax upbringing, her own epic substance abuse (in high school her dad happily gave her money to buy pot), ill-considered relationships, crippling panic attacks, and a feckless adulthood spent nibbling at the edges of the entertainment industry. Carlin’s absorption in herself and her family melodrama is intense; the narrative is full of neediness, narcissism, and name dropping—“Nothing could possibly top having sex with Leif Garrett in Ryan O’Neal and Farrah Fawcett’s bed”—and her accounts of her parent’s funerary rites drag on for chapters. Still, she captures the wackiness of celebrity-hood, and pens a vivid portrait of her parents, with acerbic wit and real pathos. Agent: Eddie Pietzak, Renaissance.

July 1, 2015
George Carlin's daughter offers an intimate look at her life growing up with a comedy legend. Kelly Carlin was the only child of a father who started doing stand-up "on the stoops on his block, imitating the priests, cops and shopkeepers of [his New York City] neighborhood." By the time she was 3, the family moved from Manhattan to Hollywood, where her father began to taste the success he had always dreamed of. But notoriety had its price. Carlin and her mother, Brenda, were often alone while George was out on the road performing. Brenda began to turn to alcohol and drugs to assuage the pain of separation and-in accordance with her husband's wishes-of being unable to seek a life and career outside the home. Tired of being a "performing monkey" who entertained without touching on what he considered to be the truths of his times, George outgrew his early image as a clean-cut performer. By the early 1970s, he was routinely dropping acid, ingesting "ridiculous amounts of cocaine" and openly challenging the establishment with fiercely provocative comedy. Meanwhile, the Carlin household descended into chaos. Brought up without a clear sense of herself, the directionless author became involved in abusive relationships, a pattern she broke only after deciding to return to college in her late 20s. From that moment on, her "poor Hollywood rich kid" story evolves into an even more compelling one about a woman who struggles to come to terms with the parents she loved but whose choices and permissiveness caused her to stumble as a young adult. Without casting blame on either parent, Carlin emerges from the troubled shadow of her family. She becomes a self-aware woman able to appreciate the contributions both made to her life and-in the case of her father, the comedic "god you could smoke a joint with"-to the world. A funny, honest, and compassionate account of growing up with a master of comedy.

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August 1, 2015
In a career spanning almost six decades, legendary humorist George Carlin wielded a great influence far beyond the stand-up comedy world, authoring books of trenchant social criticism and provoking a major Supreme Court case on profanity with his seven dirty words routine. Born in 1963, just before her father skyrocketed to fame, Carlin's daughter, Kelly, witnessed a major chunk of the comedian's career firsthand. In this bittersweet but thoroughly entertaining memoir, Kelly transcribes and expands on her acclaimed solo stage show of the same title, and adds colorful anecdotes and insights into her father's character. Along with the already familiar details about Carlin's drug addiction and rehab history, Kelly also includes many brighter moments of the pair's sillier misadventures together. More than simply offering a biography of her father, Kelly also tells a much-needed, revealing story about what it means to grow up in the shadow of fame and overcome dysfunctional, show-business-family patterns on the way to her own successful performing and writing career.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)