Vendor
	Fletcher Agency Melissa Chinchillo
Original language
English
Categories
Memoirs

THIS WILL BE FUNNY LATER

Jenny Pentland

This sharp and fiercely funny memoir by Jenny Pentland - daughter of Roseanne Barr - is a coming-of-age story about living in the shadow of celebrity and finding your own way amidst the chaos.

As the daughter of controversial TV star and comedian Roseanne Barr, Jenny spent an unusual childhood bouncing from one self-help retreat to another, as her parents tried to keep her and her siblings occupied and out of the way: fat camps, brat camps, wilderness survival, drug rehab (despite the fact that she'd never used).

Now as an adult, having overcome an eating disorder and crippling anxiety, she lives on a farm in Hawaii with her husband and four sons, creating the stable family she never had. Her mother lives nearby and they remain close, despite their political differences. Jenny's personal essays tell the tragi-comic (but mostly comic) story of how she found her way through a chaotic upbringing and offer to readers her hard-earned insights about the problems arising from celebrity worship and celebrity media.

Helping Jenny with Happy Face Trouble is Lisa Gabriele, a journalist and television producer of such shows as Master Chef and Dragon's Den (the original Shark Tank format). She collaborated with Shark Tank personality Kevin O'Leary on his two bestselling books and is also a bestselling author in her own right. Her most recent novel, The Winters, was published by Viking (US) and Doubleday Canada. Lisa and Jenny met a few years ago when they pitched a TV show based on Jenny's life on her goat farm. That project eventually morphed into working together on this book.

Jenny Pentland is a writer, mother, and goat farmer, and has an active social media presence on Twitter and Instagram.

Available products
Book Published 2022-01-01 by HarperCollins

Comments

Booklist Advance Reviews
December 15, 2021 This Will Be Funny Later: A Memoir.
By Jenny Pentland
Jan. 2022. 352p. Harper, $27.99 (9780062962928). 791
The daughter of comedian Roseanne Barr recounts her unusual childhood with humor and self-deprecation. Pentland’s early childhood in the late 1970s was spent in Utah, where her father worked as a postman and her mother stayed at home raising her, her older sister Jessica, and younger brother Jake. All of that changed when her mother decided to pursue her dream of being a stand-up comic in Los Angeles. When Roseanne skyrocketed to superstardom with her eponymous sitcom, the Pentland kids became the subject of paparazzi attention, and Jessica and then Jenny found themselves shipped off to fat camp and then reform school for what, at least in Jenny’s case, amounted to little more than typical teen antics. Though she often takes a comedic tone when describing the ups and downs of her time at many different reform schools and a survivalist camp, when Pentland grows up, marries, and has a family of her own, she finds that she has lingering PTSD from her experiences. This offers plenty of heart and laughs, especially for children of the 1980s and 1990s. YA/M: Teens struggling with their weight and/or emotional issues will find solace and solidarity here.
—Kristine Huntley

"After her mother, actress Roseanne Barr, moved the family to celebrity-soaked Hollywood from working-class Denver, using personal details from their lives there for her sitcom's storylines, the teenaged Pentland endured anxiety and eating issues and various 1980s-sanctioned self-help interventions while muttering to herself This Will Be Funny Later (evidently proved here)."