I genuinely consider this book to be the most beautiful piece of work I've ever created. You can give this book to anyone for the holidays and they will genuinely believe that you know them better than they had ever realized. I cannot explain this effect. I can only tell you that it is so.
[THIS SPECIAL KINDLE PRICE WILL NOT LAST. I suspect, even as we speak, people are trying to undo my personal tomfoolery.]
FROM THE BACK COVER
Daniel Grunman remembers his grandmother telling him, "We're Jews. We don't believe in tragedy. We believe in horror, atrocity and injustice. And we recognize all of them as inherently hilarious."
The Grunmans consider themselves a supremely functional family, in that they manage a wry self-awareness about the drinking, the pot smoking, the long-seething resentments, the brooding jealousies and the perpetual, judgmental subtext. In twenty hilariously poignant flashbulb vignettes a family comes to light, revealed in lean exchanges of unconscious cruelty and recognizable evasion.
With deft, delicate brush strokes, award-winning playwright and humorist Dylan Brody delivers a family so specific that we fear we trespass on their intimacy. We observe behavior in such startling detail because our tour guide effortlessly guides us to those small bits that matter most: the fingertip manipulations of a cocktail napkin, the generational echo of an inflective grunt. We watch them behave, we hear them speak, we learn their tells.
Deaths, losses, betrayals and slights resonate along umbilical bonds of familial connection.
Secrets will be revealed. Son, father, mother and daughter will lash out at one another and reach out toward one another. Words will be spoken and silences will descend. Jokes will be written. It will never be too soon.
