Author of the week

Rob Delaney

Rob Delaney wants to ruin your week, said Alex Moshakis in The Guardian. His new memoir, A Heart That Works, is about losing a son at age 2 to brain cancer, and its first mission is to make you feel the pain its author does. “I sat down to write this book thinking, How can I hurt people?” says the 45-yearold writer and comedian. “I wanted to offload some pain, I wanted to spread it around, I wanted to bruise people’s psyches and hearts.” Delaney, who co-created the comedy series Catastrophe, swears he doesn’t hate people who haven’t been through anything as devastating. But he had already written about his anger and grief online and an editor encouraged him to share more. “I thought the kindest thing to do,” he says, “would be to drop a bomb on anybody who read the book, so that they would know the horror, and thereby gain a better relationship with truth and reality.”

But A Heart That Works doesn’t stop at anger, said Dina Gachman in The New York Times. In fact, it’s “ultimately about all-encompassing, heart-exploding love”—Delaney’s enduring love for his son Henry, as well as his love for his wife and their other children, and for all the people who rallied around the family. Nearly five years after Henry’s death, Delaney continues to work, and continues to write comedy. But he hasn’t moved past his grief, and he’s grateful that he hasn’t. “That doesn’t mean you’re doomed to unhappiness,” he says. “You will forever miss this person; you will forever ache for them. The grief will weave into your life and will be a part of your tapestry. It’ll leave and come back. That’s OK. That’s life.”