July 28, 2020 Nick A. Zaino III
Sara Faith Alterman is not a dark person. She likes to laugh with people and make them laugh. She has done that writing humorous novels and, earlier in her career, writing sketch comedy for ImprovBoston, and currently helps other people find the laughs in their high school embarrassments as a producer with the “Mortified” storytelling show. The story she tells in her new memoir, “Let’s Never Talk About This Again” (out now), required a different approach. It is a tribute to her father Ira’s influence on her sense of humor and writing career, but it is framed by the battle with Alzheimer’s Disease that he ultimately loses.
Alterman can be silly, and she frequently indulges in her love of wordplay. The main story, broken into the “Before,” “During” and “After” of Ira’s Alzheimer’s, is heartbreaking, detailing how he loses his job and deteriorates rapidly cognitively and physically, slipping further from his family’s reach. She presents these dark and light moments together as a matter of fact — they are often happening simultaneously. The DNA for this nuanced tone is evident in the first two paragraphs. She writes:
I am pundamentally a word nerd. It comes from my father, or came, I guess. Past tense. He died. But his puns live on posthumorously.
Dad’s name is Ira, or was. I don’t know if a box of dust can have a name. I guess Ira is as good a name as any for a box of dust.
Alterman didn’t want to be coy about the fact that her father dies in the end — she hates when writers do that. “I just wanted to establish the stakes of the book right away,” she says, speaking by Zoom from her home in San Francisco, “but I wanted to do it in a way that didn’t feel doom and gloom, and felt like it did set the tone of the book, which is, ‘I’m going to talk about difficult and sad things, I’m going to try to do it in a way that is funny and hopefully fresh, but not in a way that feels like I’m either making light of death or trying to joke around my own pain.”
Read the full article here: Sara Faith Alterman Shares Humor And Heartbreak In Memoir ‘Let’s Never Talk About This Again’