This Will All Be Over Soon: A Memoir

"This is a very different book than the others. It is mostly written in the present tense. Many of the short chapters are addressed to Strong’s young cousin, Owen, who dies of brain cancer just as COVID starts spreading in New York City. Other chapters are addressed to a generalized ‘you’. Much of the book takes the form of diary entries taking us through the first year of the pandemic, with Strong living in New York and navigating a relationship with a man she meets right before New York City goes into lockdown. Many of the diary entries include extended flashbacks recounting Strong’s childhood, education, and work as a Saturday Night Live cast member. This Will All Be Over Soon is a short book by a highly emotional person who often provides a blow-by-blow account of her feelings. Strong describes having a lot of anxiety and depression which make it difficult for her to get perspective on her emotions. This memoir reminded me of Abbie Jacobson’s 2018 memoir I Might Regret This. Jacobson is 38, Strong is 36. I think that many in this generation feel that the best way they can help other people is by being as forthright as possible about their own experiences and giving other people the space to do the same. That ethos isn’t for everyone. Some people really hated this book. I read some Amazon reviews that complained, ‘She’s so preoccupied with her feelings. I wanted to read this book to find out about how she became a star!’ “Celebrities are not just singers, actors, athletes: they are also entrepreneurs whose product is themselves” This is not that kind of celebrity memoir (and Strong isn’t that big a star). Another Amazon reviewer wrote, I think quite accurately, ‘this book is so disorganized and free associative, it would never have been published if the author weren’t famous.’ That’s true, but I think it’s too bad that books like this have a hard time getting published when they’re written by regular folks. It would be great to read more accounts by ordinary people who kept journals during the first year of COVID. We often protectively forget what it felt like to live through a scary event. I know I have already started to forget what life was like in New York City during the first weeks of the pandemic. I appreciated Strong’s book as a historical account that helped me access my memories of that time. There may be a personal element to my appreciation of Strong’s book. My wife of 20 years died of cancer in February 2019. Almost a year after that, when I was beginning to tiptoe back into some semblance of normalcy, the pandemic began. I appreciated reading a book about someone who endured a major loss that was not COVID-related and had to process that while living with the uncertainty of COVID. This book was actually recommended to me by a friend who lost her husband to cancer during the pandemic. Like her, I found it helpful as a reflection on what it’s like to contend with multiple forms of loss and grief. It’s not an easy read. Strong is a comedian, but she doesn’t try to laugh her way through things. There are very few jokes, which seemed appropriate. I thought it was instructive to see that even a comedian won’t always use humor to cope. If we compare this book to Will Smith’s, where he reflects on how in his youth he often tried to address everything by being funny, we see how brave and mature Strong is in her willingness to treat loss and pain as genuinely sad."