Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage., hits stores today – here are our favorite passages
People who know Rob Delaney – his 954,000 Twitter followers included – know him as a comedian gifted in the art of hilarity in 140 characters or less. But with the release of his first book Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage. Tuesday, Delaney will soon be known as a writer, one who turned his teenage binge drinking and mid-twenties struggle with alcoholism into comedy.
The book – we'll call it 'MWSHWFYTC' – is a speed read that takes the reader from Delaney's native Marblehead, Massachusetts in the early 1990s to present-day Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife and two sons. The years in between, though, are where Delaney's prose is at its most powerful. The comical (if dangerous) bouts of binge drinking suddenly crash into Delaney's rock bottom, which involves a hospital, rehab and a halfway house.
Many pages of his book are strewn with profanity, fart jokes or comments about genitalia; you'll finish the book knowing more about his personal evolution in masturbatory habits than his courtship with his wife. The language is stronger than the typical memoir of triumph over struggle, but then again, not every writer can weave body fluids and body parts into a touching essay about a battle with depression, or three halfway house buddies who never made it out. Those vignettes bookending his battles are less engaging, but Delaney's unflinching description of addiction and depression should be required reading for those who've ever struggled with either disease.
Here are 10 standout themes and passages from the book.
On eating
Cheesecake. Are you shitting me? Who invented that? Probably Jesus of Nazareth. Or maybe Louis Pasteur. It makes me physically sick to think that Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, yet the name of the inventor of cheesecake isn't tatooed on Dick Cheney's face.
On discovering drinking
I drank three or four cans of Budweiser and, boy oh boy, did I like the way I felt. I remember an older guy punching me very hard in the arm when I said I didn't think Ride the Lightning was Metallica's best album. Another guy threw me off John's back porch into a rose bush. An adult man wearing a T-shirt with a swastika on it stuck a joint in my face and I was too afraid not to smoke it. I later recognized his face on the front page of the Marblehead Reporter. He was in court, in handcuffs, giving the photographer two middle fingers. He'd been arrested for spray-painting the names of concentration camps all over a temple in town.
On drunken bedwetting
Yes, there were flashier episodes in my drinking career, like car crashes and drunken fights with my girlfriend in the middle of the street, but the elegance of asking a stranger to help me find a specialty product that helped me reduce the damage that my routine bedwetting caused was a beautiful, shimmering red flag.
On jumping off the Manhattan Bridge
We walked out over the East River, hitting the deck whenever a train came by, and made it about one-eighth of a mile from the Brooklyn shore, then up to our station. Our first instructions from Tony were to climb down a level on the bridge and, I swear to God, disable the red lights that hang from the bridge to alert airplanes, "Hello. I am a bridge." I'm sure that today, after 9/11, New York law enforcement would "Truck 6" your ass off for that stunt, but our adventure took place two years prior to the attacks, so we didn't imagine anyone would be too upset that we were turning a piece of vital metropolitan infrastructure into an amusement park ride and making it partially invisible to air traffic.
Then Tony, who claimed to be a "theatrical rigger," took out the bungee cord and secured it to something. To what? To a piece of bridge, I guess. I have no idea. Tony then asked who wanted to go first and a short guy with a buzz cut volunteered.
On rehab
The grounds of Las Encinas are beautiful and are actually designated as a registered arboretum by the state of California. The hospital itself is home to crazy people whose lives had gotten to the point that they needed a little "time-out" and the opportunity to regroup with the help of medicine and doctors. I fit right the fuck in, and I was once again grateful my outsides matched my insides for the first time in a long time. My brain and heart had developed some kinks that were killing me and I knew they needed straightening.
On halfway-house living
The owner of the house was bonkers too, but in a good way. He was a black-clad biker with a big gray goatee and gruff voice he'd use to call us "bitches." His mind was utterly fried from drugs, but he just wanted to do what he could do to help people get and stay clean. He was like a blue-collar angel; just a good guy in the trenches of life, getting dirty and helping people. He provided people with a place to stay and started them out on the path to getting better. And it worked for a lot of people. Not everyone, though.
On depression
Depression is the absence of emotion. I never cried during my darkest periods of depression. Crying would have been A HOLIDAY. It would have been FUCKING CHRISTMAS. A fight or a feeling of anger would have been AN EASTER EGG HUNT AT DISNEYLAND. I am vocal about my depression now because it was so fucking Satanically awful that I view it as one of my life's primary missions to help other people understand and overcome it.
On contracting hepatitis A at MTV
The fantastic news is that we all had hepatitis A, not B or C. Those ones kills you. Hepatitis A rarely kills people and then once it's gone, it's gone and you're immune to it. So if you're test-driving hepatitises, may I recommend hepatitis A? It really is the Cadillac of hepatitises.
On cats v dogs
I love dogs, too, so I don't take a side on the cats vs dogs battle many of earth's citizens are involved in. That said, I fuckin' love cats. And they love me. In me, they recognize a true friend. They'll run across the street to say hello to me. More than once I've been driving, seen a cat on the sidewalk, stopped and rolled down my window, and the cat's run up and let me reach out my window and pet it. We have an understanding.
On fatherhood
The way I see it, my new primary function on earth is simply to die before my son. Hopefully it'll happen as far into the future as possible so he is best prepared to deal with the vicissitudes of life, which can range in pleasurability from eating a fresh key lime pie you made yourself after a rewarding sixty-nine session with a new love, all the way to having to pay for back surgery with three credit cards because you couldn't afford the COBRA payments on the health insurance you lost when you were laid off from you job as a teacher.
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