Table Of ContentCopyright © 2019 by Chelsea Handler
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division
of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
SPIEGEL & GRAU and colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Handler, Chelsea, author.
Title: Life will be the death of me: and you, too! / Chelsea Handler.
Description: First edition. | New York: Spiegel & Grau, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2019004975| ISBN 9780525511779 (hardback) | ISBN 9780525511786
(ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Handler, Chelsea. | Women comedians-United States-Biography.
Classification: LCC PN1992.4.H325 A3 2019 | DDC 792.702/8092 [B]-dc22 LC record
available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004975
spiegelandgrau.com
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Debbie Glasserman, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Greg Mollica
Cover photograph: Emily Shur
v5.4_r1
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Where Have I Been All My Life
Room Temperature Water
Death Valley
Tammy Time
Seymour
Chunk
Oh, Mother
Ayahuasca
Moving Hillsides
New Love
Marijuana Keeps Families Together
The Year I Became Me
Photo Insert
Dedication
Acknowledgments
By Chelsea Handler
About the Author
Far too many people are looking for the right
person, instead of trying to be the right person.
—GLORIA STEINEM
I
don’t remember the actor, and I don’t remember the movie, but I
remember it was five o’clock in the afternoon and I had just taken a
couple hits off my vape pen. I needed to load my Pix account, which
held pre-released movies that I was expected to screen before a star
of one of the movies was a guest on my Netflix talk show. I was
sitting on one of my overpriced chaise longues, the kind that
celebrities and Russians purchase for their bedrooms, when I found
myself once again unable to convert the TV that descends from the
ceiling from Apple TV to Pix. Rich people have descending smart
televisions. The idea is that they descend silently and gracefully from
the ceiling, but because I am nouveau-riche rich, mine sounds more
like a helicopter landing. I’d like to blame my inability to change the
mode of my television to Pix on the fact that I was stoned, but that
would be a lie; I’d be even less capable if I was sober.
I called my assistant Brandon at his house, to tell him to tell my
other assistant, Tanner—who was downstairs in my house—to come
upstairs and help me with the television. I hung up the phone. I
looked down at the table and saw the vape pen. How many more hits
of marijuana would I need to get through this movie?
I knew things had hit a new low—or high, depending on how you
looked at the situation. I picked up the iPad that controls the TV
along with everything else in my house—from the window shades to
the exterior lights in my backyard, to my pulse, probably—and tried
to pretend that I was troubleshooting, so that Tanner would think I
had at least tried to figure it out on my own—as if that had ever
happened before.
How did I become so useless? And how many assistants did I
actually have? Answer: two. Brandon and Tanner. Brandon is gay
and has an incredible attention to detail. Tanner is straight, and
before he met me, he thought the Four Seasons was a weather
pattern. Before I met Tanner, I thought Venmo was an online liquor
store.
Tanner was now upstairs standing behind the chaise I was sitting
on. I wondered if he could smell the weed I’d just smoked, and if so,
what did he think of me? Did he realize that most television hosts
don’t even make the time to watch movies and TV shows to prepare
for each of their upcoming guests? Did he understand that I was a
consummate professional who went to great lengths to get ready for
my show? Or did he think that I was just some rich, lucky, white
bitch who continued to fall upward? No, that wasn’t quite right: I
doubt he was thinking in terms of race. Two white people surely
weren’t thinking about skin color. I was the one thinking that.
I didn’t want to watch another stupid fucking movie that I didn’t
care about. And I really didn’t want to interview another action star
bloviating about his motivation for playing a half man, half mermaid.
I just didn’t care, and I wasn’t doing anyone any favors by pretending
that I did.
Did I ever care? The answer is yes. There was a time when all of
this mattered to me. There was a time when being famous and
having this kind of success and money and having a TV show was
what drove me to want more and more and more, and now I found
myself exhausted and ashamed by the meaninglessness of it all.
I remember coming home a couple of weeks before the 2016
election on a windy fall night—which for Los Angeles is rare.
Anytime there’s weather in Los Angeles, even rain, it’s exciting—the
constant sunshine can start to grate on your nerves. I went up to my
bedroom, opened up my sliding glass doors, grabbed my vape pen,
and turned on some Neil Young. I lay on my bed in the dark,
watching the wind blow my bedroom drapes around, hearing the
ruffling of the leaves, and watching the lanterns that hang from my
backyard trees swinging into each other, thinking, If there’s an
electrical fire, I hope the dogs will at least bark to wake me up, but
overall, my thought was: This is fucking awesome. This is exactly
what I’d hoped adulthood would be.
No kids, no husband, no responsibilities—just a TV show on
Netflix and whatever else I felt like doing, whenever I felt like doing
it. Not trapped, not stuck, not dependent on a single person but
myself—free to be you and me. I couldn’t believe how lucky my life
had turned out, how many of my dreams had come true, and also my
good fortune in being alive during this time in history—the year we
were going to elect our first female president.
I suppose I could blame my state of mind on the election of Donald
Trump—so I will. I have the Trump family and their horrifying
personalities and veneers to thank for my midlife crisis. Along with
more than half the population—of the world—I couldn’t grasp how,
in this day and age, we elected a man who insulted Mexicans and
women and Muslims and veterans and disabled people and everyone
else he has insulted since. The contrast in decency between Barack
Obama and Donald Trump was too much for me to bear—like
electing Snooki to the Senate. Now people were seriously talking
about Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson running for president. How on
earth did we get here? Although, if I’m being honest, at that point in
time—or at any other time during the entire Trump presidency—I
would have preferred an actual rock.
How could Americans have turned their back on decency, and why
was I so misinformed? How did I not know this outcome was even a
possibility? What was I missing?
