Jokes My Father Never Taught Me: Life, Love, and Loss with Richard Pryor Edition: First Edition first Printing

This is a loving yet brutally honest memoir by the daughter of comedy legend Richard Pryor. Rain Pryor was born in the idealistic, free-love 1960s. Her mother was a Jewish go-go dancer who wanted a "tribe of rainbow children," and her father was Richard Pryor, perhaps the most compelling and brilliant comedian of his era. In this intimate, harrowing, and often hilarious memoir, Rain depicts a disturbing childhood in the shadow of her celebrated father. Rain's memoir is a complicated all-American tale. Her home life was infused with drugs and sex; at age eight she sat down to Thanksgiving dinner with the words, "Daddy, the whores need to be paid." "Jokes My Father Never Taught Me" is both lovingly told and painfully frank: the story of a girl who grew up adoring her father even as she feared him - and feared for him, as his drug problems grew worse. In 1980, he was nearly killed in a "revolutionary suicide attempt. And in his later years, as he succumbed to multiple sclerosis, Rain saw her [...]father reduced to watching the Comedy Channel for hours on end. Rain Pryor's book gives an unprecedented look at the life of a legend of comedy, told by a daughter who both understood the genius and knew the man.