Matt’s Book Club.

Before the age of 30, Harris Wittels had accomplished greatness. He was a writer on two of my favorite TV shows – “The Sarah Silverman Program” and “Parks and Recreation” – and for the longest time, he was the anonymous genius behind the humblebrag Twitter feed, skewering famous people who tried to surreptitiously boast about themselves:

@KrisAllen “Checking out at CVS and my song comes on the speakers. Awkward…..” 

Harris broke it down to a science:

This is an example of one of my favorite types of Humblebrag – the “awkward” Humblebrag. The situations Humblebraggers define as awkward are never actually awkward. It’s just a good way for them to punctuate a brag. Who was this awkward for? The only situation in which this would be awkward is if Adam Lambert (the guy Allen beat on “American Idol”) was the cashier… which he may have been. I truly haven’t kept up on Adam Lambert’s post-Idol career. If Adam Lambert is in fact a CVS cashier, I will gladly post a retraction. 

Then, at age 34, Harris died of a heroin overdose. It rocked the comedy community. His sister Stephanie, a talented playwright and director who teaches at a high school for the performing arts in their hometown of Houston, was hit hardest by his death, and decided to write a book about it. She has a phenomenal writing style:

My husband Mike writes an obituary that is beautiful and poignant, but the newspaper sends us an invoice for $2,563.72, which is goddamn lunacy. It’s like the scene from The Big Lebowski where the snooty funeral director tries to sell John Goodman’s character an urn for $180, and he shouts, “Just because we’re bereaved doesn’t make us saps!” Then he pounds his fist on the desk and transports the ashes in a Folgers coffee can. Mike edits the obituary down to $1,406.34.
The day before the funeral, I realize I have nothing to wear. I have to go to a store where people are buying dresses for happy occasions and buy a dress to wear to your funeral, a dress that will forever hang in my closet as the dress I wore to my brother’s funeral. I’ll never wear it again, but I won’t ever give it away. It will just hang there, sadly and forever, as a daily reminder that things can always be worse. 

In the midst of this enormous tragedy, Stephanie was dealing with even more adversity: her baby girl had been diagnosed with permanent hearing loss in both ears. Stephanie wrote absolute prose about it:

This wasn’t the movie I’d directed in my mind. The movie starred a radiant postpartum mother and her perfect newborn baby: Mom taking a brisk walk every morning with her baby tucked tightly in her gender-neutral stroller under layers of soft blankets or nuzzled close to Mom in her organic baby sling as passers by ooh and aah over her beauty, sharing frequent play dates with friends who also have little ones, commiserating over poopy diapers and sleep deprivation, writing funny anecdotes in a handmade baby book from Etsy, lying in bed with the perfect little family, daydreaming about who she’ll be when she grows up.