Rob Delaney: Human
“a possibly better way of being a person, without sacrificing the fart jokes”
Review by Roy Coughlin
My last memory before blacking out was filling a big red Solo cup up to the top with bourbon, vodka, and ice. If you're not a drinker, bourbon and vodka on ice is not actually a drink.
– Rob Delaney, Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage.
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Rob Delaney was an accomplished drunk, the kind who strode confidently up to the limit and then right on past without the burden of second thoughts. His description of how right the introduction of booze felt to his system (“Ooh, here we go. Here I am.”) rings a familiar bell in my head. I still struggle with drinking, although for me it's fairly uneventful and indefinite, unlike the spectacular crash-and-burns Delaney relates in this book.
It is alcoholism and the inevitable fallout and recovery that are the core of Mother. Wife. Sister. . . We're given peripheral stories from his childhood and early adulthood, but many of these contain the common through-line of his budding recklessness and drunkenness. The honesty, humility, and humor conveyed in the process of describing his addiction make great reading and make me wish that the rest of the threads of the book were gathered more tightly into this theme. The chapters about the brutal accident that finally pushed him into sobriety, and those about his time in rehab and his subsequent depression back in the “real world” after, could be the core of a larger, more cohesive book. Here, they mostly anchor a looser collection of personal essays that never quite coalesce.
But hey, it's still a funny, intelligent, and at times moving collection at that. Like many of my favorite comedians working now (Louis C.K. is a prime example), Delaney tries to address deeper ideals and maybe even illuminate a possibly better way of being a person, without sacrificing the fart jokes, so to speak. Instead of the constant stream of jokes and unreliable narration that can accompany humorous autobiographies, Mother. Wife. Sister . . . mixes the funny with the serious in a balance that is, if not entirely consistent, at least interesting, vacillating between linear exposition and lingering rumination. He's clearly an earnest, thoughtful person who is also damn funny, and those traits find their way to page, sometimes circuitously, sometimes directly. And sometimes he's just plain gross and hilarious (and strangely poetic):
I crouched in the gutter at the end of a driveway that led to the garage of a home that actual people lived in, and shit furiously and hatefully into the street. I began to know relief.
Did I mention the chapter and section titles are in French? C'est pas possible!
So, I giggle my way through to the end of the book, mostly satisfied, but I keep coming back to those meatier chapters about addiction and redemption and wishing there was more. Coming from a person whose drinking wasn't "rooted in anything [. . .] other than genetics and a bottomless appetite for life," the simple explanations of booze's sly benefits remind me of my own experience. I recognize how different Delaney and I are as drunks, but sentences like this dovetail smoothly with my feelings:
Alcohol allowed me to toy with fear, map its edges, and try to exercise a little control over it.
It seems that Rob Delaney feels lucky and grateful for his alcoholic burn out, circumstances that all but dictated he get his shit together. And he did. For me, his story is a strangely comforting cautionary tale that I can still laugh at. Or with.
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