I first got introduced to Doug Stanhope’s brand of comedy a few years ago with his skit on trying to ‘sleep sober’ and the ensuing carnival that kicks in when you try; as an insomniac, even if one who tends to be sober when attempting to sleep for reasons of silly day job, it struck a chord and I liked what I saw enough to look for more. Since then, he’s become one of my favourite comics, always with the right blend of the ascerbic and the brutally honest. I’d heard him speak about his mother Bonnie during his stage shows, but I was honestly unaware of what happened at the end of her life until I heard about the book. I was also completely unaware that Stanhope was such a talented writer. Digging up Mother is both Bonnie’s and Doug’s story (and you come out of the experience feeling as though you could, in some ways, be on first-name terms with them both).
The book begins where it ends, with Stanhope’s mother making the decision that she wasn’t going to just wait around for her terminal lung disease to kill her: instead, she decides to swallow as many pills as she has been able to stash away for just such an occasion, ditching sobriety for one last round of cocktails to wash them down. Her son and his girlfriend facilitate this, with Doug praising her courageousness for making this decision; so, yep, it’s worth knowing that the book begins with someone assisting a suicide. We don’t tend to discuss death very readily in our culture, electing for euphemism and platitudes, of which there are absolutely none here. Elements of this are, inevitably, shocking and surprising, but then the whole topic is met with a kind of warmth and unfussed levity, a desire to just tell the tale candidly, as a debt of honour to Mother’s memory. Out of this comes plenty of laughs, too, from Mother’s last words, even to Stanhope’s description of his own, standard-issue drinker’s confusion the morning after his mother’s suicide. But all of this is just a small part of his mother’s story and so the rest of the book comprises an autobiography – one which combines Doug’s story with his mother’s.
A great deal of the book is a kind of interrogation of what made Bonnie the woman she was, as if her son needs to suss this out to be able to make sense of it all and that makes for an often stark read, alongside all of the genuine love and warmth. The book never sugar-coats anything and it refuses to deal in language which prettifies. However, in other respects this is a regular memoir, going back to Doug’s childhood, the various jobs and city changes which happened along the way and eventually, how he made the leap into stand-up comedy (this always seems like a job without a standard career arc, but exposure to AA circle-meets, bar work and telesales are all there along the way and you can see some of those things impacting on Doug’s comedy act).
And it’s funny. It’s incredibly funny. The school psychiatrist episode is a high point, just as one example, but there are tonnes of things here that made me put the book down so I could belly-laugh. It’s not just the nature of the anecdotes, either, it’s the phrasing too. You can hear Stanhope’s voice throughout this book; he’s all about sending himself up as well as reflecting on his own behaviours down through the years, so a lot of the jokes are on him, but he also speaks really candidly about people who are in or have been in his life. The overall result is of a very honest, self-aware author who knows his craft. Nothing’s off limits. If you know his comedy work, then you’ll know what to expect here.
But perhaps what you get most of all is something you might not get from Stanhope on-stage ordinarily, and that’s a real and rare sense of a son’s love for his mother – a woman who he acknowledges as flawed in many respects, but perhaps that makes it all the more poignant. I didn’t expect the book to be as moving as it was, which is perhaps a bizarre thing to say when you know damn well it’s going to be about a death, but you get such a sense of the closeness between mother and son throughout the book and then the end, when it comes, is handled with the same detail and honesty. I think it’s very brave to applaud a woman’s bravery in ending her own life the way that Doug Stanhope does at the end of this book; people don’t tend to say it out loud, much less about their own parents. But this isn’t a conventional yarn or writer, and it is really a ‘love story’. I wholeheartedly recommend it.