Author of the week: Sarah Silverman

last updated 8 January 2015

You can tell that Sarah Silverman’s new memoir, The Bedwetter, was written with no blueprint, said Will Leitch in New York. An “odd, shambling, and funny” work, it reveals the tender side of a comedian whose provocative humor often offends a viewer or two. The title is part true-confession: Three years before she quit New York University, at 19, to start doing stand-up, Silverman was still wetting beds. At one point during adolescence, she suffered from depression so severely that she took 16 Xanax a day and dropped out of high school for a year. “Everyone has sad stories,” she says. The first 75 pages of her book mostly pay tribute to her mother and three sisters.

The book’s afterword is ostensibly written by God, said Jordan Foster in Publishers Weekly. How did the author manage such a coup? “This is so trite but … sex,” she says. Those closing pages, supposedly written after Silverman’s death in old age, suggest that the Silverman of 2010 might be worried that she has hit a career crossroads. At 39, she fears that she can’t long sustain her persona as the seeming innocent with the ugly heart. “I can’t be in my 40s in pigtails and a football jersey,” Silverman says. She also claims to be weary of controversy. “I don’t want to be the comic who talks about race all the time.” For now, while she works to reinvent her act, she’s giving God the last word. In Bedwetter, he reports that Silverman was banned from TV in 2018 for the crime of not being cute anymore.