A Carlin Home Companion: Growing Up with George

The home life of legendary countercultural comedian George Carlin was a barrel of laughs, drugs, and dysfunctions, according to this wry, raw memoir by his only child. Kelly Carlin, a radio host and monologist, recounts her parents’ devotion to booze, weed, cocaine, and pills; their multiple arrests for obscenity, drug possession, and DUI; and her mother’s near-death from alcoholism. Carlin also describes the electric aura of fame surrounding her father and the shadow it threw on her and her mother, as well as his miscellaneous psychotic breaks, including the time George urgently warned family and friends that the sun had exploded. The legacy for the author was an incredibly lax upbringing, her own epic substance abuse (in high school her dad happily gave her money to buy pot), ill-considered relationships, crippling panic attacks, and a feckless adulthood spent nibbling at the edges of the entertainment industry. Carlin’s absorption in herself and her family melodrama is intense; the narrative is full of neediness, narcissism, and name dropping—“Nothing could possibly top having sex with Leif Garrett in Ryan O’Neal and Farrah Fawcett’s bed”—and her accounts of her parent’s funerary rites drag on for chapters. Still, she captures the wackiness of celebrity-hood, and pens a vivid portrait of her parents, with acerbic wit and real pathos. Agent: Eddie Pietzak, Renaissance. (Sept.)