He is also surprisingly specific, and not at all lurid, about living with her bulimia and, once it was in check, trying to conceive a child with her. In the course of being treated for infertility, Radner was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
"While Gilda was throwing up in our bedroom in Connecticut, I was writing a comedy in the room just below her," he writes. "It sounds oxymoronic, but absurdity was a familiar guest now."
Wilder is honest enough to describe how he met Karen Webb, who would become his fourth wife, while dealing with the worst of Radner's fatal illness.
Wilder writes one chapter that takes its name from Radner's trademark Saturday Night Live phrase, "It's Always Something." For him, that something turned out to be non-Hodgkins lymphoma in 1999. The course of his treatment required a stem-cell transplant and a long period of quarantine. While isolated, he became the rare celebrity very nearly killed by a tabloid reporter.
A spy from the Star intended to sneak into his hospital room by delivering flowers at a time when Wilder was too weak to fend off contamination.
However, in "a story out of Grimm's fairy tales, except that it had just happened in the lobby downstairs," she had a change of heart, realized the error of her ways and left him alone. Readers of this quirky, unabashed book will easily understand what it is about Wilder that made the reporter want to be kind.
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