For sister of comic talent who OD’d, grief remains a sad and funny thing
‘Everything Is Horrible and Wonderful: A Tragicomic Memoir of Genius, Heroin, Love, and Loss’ By Stephanie Wittels Wachs Sourcebooks, 288 pp., $25.99
Death prompts no magical thinking in Stephanie Wittels Wachs’ “Everything Is Horrible and Wonderful.” The Houston author’s memoir was shaken into being with a clinically cold phone call from a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department.
“When was the last time you spoke to your brother?”
“I don’t know. Why? What’s going on? I’m changing my baby’s diaper.”
“Is there another adult with you?”
And that’s how Wittels Wachs learned that her beloved younger brother Harris — a comedian with an impressive body of work to his name and a boundless future ahead of him — was dead at age 30 from a heroin overdose.
Like his sister, Harris Wittels grew up in Houston and attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. And though his comedy didn’t put him on arena stages, his work was widely respected, admired and loved by funny people including Sarah Silverman, Amy Poehler, Aziz Ansari and many more. He wrote jokes for President Barack Obama and coined “humblebrag,” a word recognized by Merriam-Webster. As a writer and producer, he made crucial contributions to the humor of TV’s “Parks and Recreation.” He could be as endearing as he was funny, so his following was fervent, especially among young comedy fans — especially among young comedy fans in Houston.
In early 2015, he’d begun work with Ansari on the award-winning TV show “Master of None.” And then he was gone.
Grief for the deaths of entertainers has transformed acutely in recent years. A mopey evening with a newspaper obit and an old LP has, in modern times, become a global tapestry of remembrance, a micro-poetic mix of memories and video clips and photos — all of it wholly public. With her book, Wittels Wachs mops up that outpouring of grief from the public domain and wrings it back into the bottle of the personal, where the repercussions of a tragedy don’t fade with a new news cycle. Fans get to keep the laughs, but they don’t have to empty the apartment of a comedian who died too young. As described in this touching memoir, grief is a familial phantom limb constantly tapping the shoulders of the survivors.
But before the tapping really begins, Wittels Wachs describes having to jump in her car to inform her parents before a TMZ report reverberates from Los Angeles to Houston. From changing a dirty diaper to telling her parents their son is dead — all in six whiteknuckle pages that set my teeth to grinding.
But Wittels Wachs’ book is also subtitled “A Tragicomic Memoir of Genius, Heroin, Love and Loss.” So tension and catharsis are spelled regularly by remembrances of a comedian with a shrugging natural quality that dated to his childhood. Even as a 3-year-old, Wittels would crack wise and, enamored with the positive reinforcement, kept doing so during his life.
The forward to the book recalls a spit-out-your-drink-funny reply-all email Wittels sent regarding NBC and a sexual harassment seminar (and bagels). Wittels was, if nothing else, down to clown.
He could also be sweetly profound, offering the phrase that gives the book its title: “We are all horrible and wonderful and figuring it out.”
The horrible side found Wittels with a monkey on his back. Three days before Wittels Wachs’ wedding, her brother notified her he was burning through $4,000 a month on Oxycontin.
From that point forward, “Everything Is Horrible and Wonderful” becomes unmoored from linear time, bouncing between childhood memories, stories about Wittels’ struggles and successes and Wittels Wachs’ experience in parsing through the remnants of his existence — his jokes, his belongings.
This staccato narrative approach isn’t fluid in the traditional sense but rather something that feels more real — a mental vérité capturing the ways our minds leapfrog from stimulus to memories and associations.
The transparency of her grief is at times revelatory. We like to think of ourselves as independent creatures, but “Everything Is Horrible and Wonderful” underscores how much our personae are shaped by — if not the sum of — exterior forces. She states this clearly in a conversation with her brother: “A huge part of my identity,” she tells him, “is being your sister.”
She portrays the logistics of such relationships as having a labyrinthine complexity: Hers is not a single tale of mourning but rather a map of how Wittels’ death affected her entire family differently — her mother, father, husband and daughter.
But in this narrative, she shoulders the brunt of the weight — from his addiction to his death — evidenced by that anvil of a sibling phrase: “Don’t tell Mom and Dad.”
By addressing Wittels directly at times, she appears to be trying to regain some control after it was wrested from her. “Life with an addict means constantly revising the script,” she writes.
Joys and disappointments collide as they do with family, as they do with life. The topography of “Everything Is Horrible and Wonderful” puts those forces in striking relief. But then, there aren’t many memoirs about contentment.
The stakes rose with a matter-of-fact text she received: “Hey, I’m gonna call mom and dad later but heads up I’m checking back into rehab tomorrow in Oregon. I started shooting heroin.”
His explanation is chilling: “It happened because I was curious, and it’s cheap, and pills are hard to come by.”
YouTube helped him figure out the rest.
Wittels Wachs then swiftly shifts to her favorite photo of her brother and her daughter, Iris.
Iris holds a fascinating position in the narrative. Our culture has codified the concept of a “doppelgänger” mistakenly as a lookalike. But the concept behind the word was meant to be more spiritual and less about surface similarities.
For a time, the author feels pulled by both of these characters, frankly describing a diminishing capacity to play the part of older sibling and confidante as she nurtures a much younger dependent. She sees her daughter revel in provoking laughter with her actions, and then pursue those laughs further. Thus a brother and daughter represent all the contradictory forces that balance one another, like hope and despair. Days before he died, Wittels asked for more videos of his niece.
“It was as if he was saying, ‘I need this,’ ” she writes. “‘I need a reason. I need a thing to make me keep going or I’m not going to make it.’ ”
By one measure, “Everything Is Horrible and Wonderful” spans 31 years: Wittels’ 30 years alive and the year following his death. But the book really focuses on a period of less than five years, from his admission of addiction to her decision to “start living again” a year after his death.
If not a meditation on time, the book certainly made me feel acutely aware of it: “The space between life and death is a moment,” she writes. But time’s broad strokes are here, too. Her birthday fell one day after her brother’s death, two dates forever linked. With the passing of time, she admits her grief appears smaller in the rearview but knows it will never drop entirely from the horizon. But she finds ways to focus on the wonderful more than the horrible in a story ultimately about renewal and hope.