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Yossarian Slept Here
Yossarian Slept Here
Oct 26, 2024 10:30 AM

Author:Erica Heller

Yossarian Slept Here

'You're Joseph Heller's daughter? How terrific!'

But was there a catch?

Like his most famous work, Joseph Heller was a study in contradictions: eccentric, brilliant and voracious, but also mercurial, competitive, and stubborn, with a love of mischief that sometimes cut too close to the bone. Yossarian Slept Here is a daughter's darkly funny, poignant memoir about growing up a Heller - from her colourful family members and her parents' tumultuous marriage, to her father's celebrity friends and the family's eccentric neighbours.

This is a story about achieving a dream, about fame and its aftermath, about squandered opportunities, lasting love and family.

Reviews

A finely crafted, wonderfully observed reminiscence on an extraordinary, often traumatic life

—— Independent on Sunday

An affectionate, no-punches-pulled, often hilarious memoir

—— Herald

Both charming and combative

—— New York Times

As soon as I read the opening I was determined and eager to consume everything that followed, up to and including the Pot Roast

—— Christopher Hitchens, author of Hitch-22

Heller's domestic side is evoked with painful detail by his daughter, Erica, in her well written, occasionally harrowing memoir, Yossarian Slept Here

—— Sunday Times

A likeable memoir...Yossarian Slept Here gives us the gruff, arrogant big shot; the smug cocky fellow who sometimes showed up to friend's cocktail parties for the sheer fun of insulting them

—— Financial Times

Erica Heller...seems to have weathered her girlhood better than most daughters of celebrated literary lions... Heller's book shows a robust acceptance of her father's overbearing personality and Don Draperesque approach to marriage and fatherhood... The New York of the period leaps off the page

—— Independent

With wit punctuating lambent nostalgia, Erica Heller brings her father to life in an animated, absorbing fashion, documenting his quirky habits, celebrity, and "invisible, unfathomable inner cycle," but also her parents' divorce and Heller's suffering with Guillain-Barre syndrome. The total effect is akin to leafing through a bulging family scrapbook where one finds a few blurry images among many snapshots in sharp focus. Erica Heller has inherited her father's finely tuned flair with words

—— Publishers Weekly

Intimate, yet well-researched..comedic and poignant, her many-faceted memoir is rendered in high-definition as Heller recounts meals, travels, parties, arguments, lies, and the serious illnesses that afflicted her and her parents. Writing with wit, compassion, aplomb, and no little wonder at what her father wrought and her mother endured and how this legacy shaped her, Heller presents an involving and invaluable work of personal and cultural history.

—— Booklist

Heller's family memoir brims with warm reflections right from the opening chapters... An affectionate family scrapbook crafted with a bittersweet blend of humor and pathos

—— Kirkus Reviews

Erica Heller to me is like a Carrie Fisher on the East Coast. She is as authentic as they come

—— Richard Lewis, comedian, actor, author

Erica Heller has a story to tell and I for one am eager to see it in print. I think this is going to be one hell(er) of a memoir

—— Christopher Buckley, author of Losing Mum and Pup

The New York of the period leaps off the page

—— Emma Hagestadt , Independent

Heller's domestic side is evoked with painful detail by his daughter, Erica, in her well written, occasionally harrowing memoir, Yossarian Slept Here

—— Sunday Times

Likeable memoir...just as Daugherty is blind to the limitations of Heller's work so he appears resistant to personal criticism of Heller or rebuke. Just One Catch is no hagiography but, of these two biographical accounts on Yossarian Slept Here gives us the gruff, arrogant big shot; the smug cocky fellow who sometimes showed up to friend's cocktail parties for the sheer fun of insulting them

—— Leo Robson , Financial Times
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