Bouncing Back

In Bouncing Back, Joan Rivers blends her explosively funny voice with deep compassion to produce a memorable and valuable book. Here is a fiercely honest, hilarious, and moving tale of how one of comedy's greatest stars survived the worst that life could throw at her, how she hit bottom and then made it back to the top. Joan Rivers has seen it all. As she says, the only difference between her worst year and Queen Elizabeth's "annus horribilis" was that she managed to. Stay away from pastel-colored double knits. However, in truth, the Queen's family scandals and huge back taxes were minor annoyances compared to what happened to Joan: In the relentless glare of the spotlight, she endured her husband's suicide, an estrangement from her daughter, the cancellation of her talk show, a TV "boycott" against her, and financial catastrophe. When her jewelry company went bankrupt through no fault of her own, she found herself with the national. Debt of Nicaragua. In these pages, drawn from both her wit and her soul, Joan tells how she learned to survive anything.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Self-Help, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.