If successful marks of a fond familial memoir include admiration and an intense sentiment of communal loss, Alexandra "Al" Silber's White Hot Grief Parade knocks it out of the park. At its core is Silber's father, who passed away when she was just 18 and "not done being raised." Michael was not just the gooey, magical center of the family, but a man who drew others to him, even the neighborhood "cool kids."
When Al and her mother, Catherine, are "cut off at the knees" by Mike's death following 10 years of cancer treatments, Al's boyfriend and two art camp friends move into the Silber "House of Death" to help. For the next several months, "Cathy and the drop-outs" forge a course through grief, a funeral fraught with horrific family rifts and, ultimately, the Aftermath.
The multi-talented Silber (After Anatevka), a Broadway actress and Grammy-nominee, refers to herself in the third person, bringing a fictional quality to the work. This style, along with lists, screenplay acts, word search puzzles, haiku and cryptograms, serves wonderfully (and painfully) to amplify Silber's emotions, as if they remain too hot to handle without expressing them through "Al."
Silber recounts historical moments as foundation for the breadth of the loss, and one can't help but regret not knowing Mike. Movingly, it is after his passing that Silber truly gets to know her mother, her parents' amazing love story and all Cathy has lost. Silber's memoir is lovingly told and teems with magic. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review