Enter Talking

Description for ENTER TALKING by Joan Rivers with Richard Meryman:

Can she talk! Here is the bitter and bizarre struggle, the desperate Hilarity, the deep pain and anger, that created one of the world's foremost comedians. It is the story of Joan Rivers's obsessed childhood and apprentice years, her battle against doubting parents, sleazy agents, hostile audiences in tawdry clubs--as she says, "Dying on more stages than Hamlet"---until, literally in one night, she burst through into the bright light of her show-business dream.

Certain since earliest memory that she belonged onstage, Joan Rivers survived taunts in a fat-girl youth, silence in Catskills' showrooms, and jeers in grimy strip joints. On her own in Manhattan, refusing to give up, she made ends meet as an office temporary, stealing stamps at work, hustling dimes from pay phones, and letting friendly cooks slip her scrambled eggs. From the freezing midtown attic where she acted with Barbra Streisand, to Chicago's comedy crucible, Second City, where she mastered the sophisticated comedy of her predecessors Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Alan Arkin, and Barbara Harris, Joan Rivers describes not only her interior emotional journey, but also the evolution of her own act and the new generation of comics who changed stand-up humor forever. A strictly raised product of a Larchmont home and Barnard College, Joan Rivers propelled herself into the rough-and-tumble Greenwich Village coffeehouse movement and, together with Bob Dylan, Richard, Pryor, Dick Cavett, Rodney Dangerfield, Woody Allen, Carly Simon, Mama Cass, and Bill Cosby, she strained for her precious minutes on those tiny stages. Night after night she rushed to the Cafe Au Go Go to hear the God Of the Village, Lenny Bruce, who inspired her own unsparing brand of humor. How the happy end came is the suspense of the book---and also a ringing testimony to the power of persistence.