Rob Delaney: "A Heart That Works"

One reason that I have questions about the NYTimes Book Review is that the critics can overlook a book like this. How could it fail to qualify among the "top 100" books of 2022?

And then a reason I have trouble with the current Prince Harry interviews is that I recall Delaney's book, and I think hand-wringing about Camilla's media conduct seems so, so trivial.

Rob Delaney had a child who was one, and he began to lose weight. The child had alarming pouches of skin; a doctor quickly confirmed that a tumor was growing next to the child's brain. Delaney's wife went to a separate room and began screaming; Delaney himself thought that he could magically solve the problem. (The parent will fix the child by assuming the child's burden; God will arrange a body-swap so a cosmic error can "get redressed," a patch can get stitched over the hole in the universe.)

Many would shut down, but Delaney was a writer and observer, so he made notes on the ensuing horror story. He became angry when friends would mention, "Oh, I lost a grandparent recently." ("Really?" he'd think. "Well, that's *supposed* to happen.") Delaney looked to gore-spattered cinema for comfort. He liked "Hereditary," and he especially liked "Ten Cloverfield Lane." In "Ten Cloverfield," a young woman believed that her captor was insane. (The captor had alluded to apocalyptic visits from alien beings.) At the end of the movie, it was disclosed that, although the captor really had been insane, in fact the story about the alien beings just happened to be true. The heroine was fucked from the beginning--fucked, regardless of her decisions. This made Delaney giggle--and he saw, in the details, a little metaphorical story about his own life.

Delaney grew impatient with friends who would quietly ask, "What can I do?" He valued friends who didn't ask but instead just showed up--friends who washed dishes, and distracted the extant healthy children, and tidied bedrooms. Delaney also gave his admiration to one caregiver who shouted and smashed glass objects when she heard about the failures of chemotherapy; Delaney thought that this was the one "correct" reaction, the only sensible reaction, to the story he had to tell.

Finally, when Delaney decided to pull a last plug, he endured comments from bystanders who believed there was "really more to do." He valued the doctors who wept with relief when they heard of the decision: "I'm so glad you are not going to put your son through more pain."

Delaney has worked with the writer Sharon Horgan, and I can see a similar fondness for dark humor in Delaney's work. Horgan memorably has one character trying to poison another character (but the poison finds its way into the bowels of an innocent dog). In Delaney's memoir, as a parent cradles her dead child, loud house-painters are singing along to Bieber next-door. One parent has to walk to the window and ask these painters to shut the fuck up. You can't invent a detail like that.

I thought Delaney's book was blunt and courageous -- and I also thought he had earned the right to write a memoir. I hope to look at his show, "Catastrophe," in the next few weeks.

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Liars and Saints

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