Saturday Night Live cast member Strong shows her serious side in this uneven if earnest memoir about the death of her cousin. Covering a year in diary-style entries, she begins in March 2020, two months after her cousin Owen died at age 30 of brain cancer. With SNL on hiatus due to the pandemic--and a new romance with someone who'd contracted Covid-19 on hold--she had time to reflect on her friendship with the funny, bird-obsessed Owen. Strong shares Owen's text messages and glimpses of him facing cancer with courage and humor ("You know how everybody goes... on WebMD and panics and convinces themselves they have brain cancer? Well I'm the one who actually had brain cancer"), but he remains somewhat remote. Strong's writing is more vivid when she explores her own life, notably her 1990s childhood with her troubled but bighearted brother ("I bit him hard once in the armpit") and the high school expulsion that led her to find her "people" at the Chicago Academy for the Arts. While fans may be left wanting more of Strong's personal story, her sincere tribute is nonetheless touching. Agents: Cindy Uh and Cait Hoyt, CAA. (Aug.)

Saturday Night Live cast member Strong shares her grief in the wake of her cousin's death, both to liberate herself from the pain and to memorialize him. The book is essentially the author's journal from March 2020 ("I don't know how to tell this story. I don't quite know what the story is. Because I don't know when it starts. Or how it ends") to March 2021: "I don't know what I've learned or what I know….Here's a thing I know for sure: I had a cousin named Owen who had red hair as a little boy and he was a serious kid and he loved birds. He taught me about love during his life and he's teaching me about love after." Strong chronicles the months following Owen's death from brain cancer at age 30 and provides glimpses of life during the pandemic. Her prose is sincere yet largely flavorless. Without establishing a narrative arc, the author offers little in the way of revelation, for herself or readers, delivering a collection of non sequiturs, text messages, banal confessions, and scattershot notes typed on her phone. Fans hoping for details about her experiences at SNL will be disappointed--and also surprised by the lack of humor. The author repeatedly describes herself and this work as messy, which is an apt assessment. "I seem to just keep talking (or writing in this case) and hoping someone gets a sense of me that way," she writes. In recalling a failed romance, Strong is vague and circumspect: "I accepted a lot. I'm not proud. But I think the secrecy and shame is part of why you get stuck in really bad places. In an abusive relationship. So here are empty pages." There follow 12 blank pages. Her affection for Owen, however, clearly comes through. There's no lack of emotion in Strong's voice, but the delivery mostly falls flat. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.