Francesca "Frankie" Walsh is thirty-two, broke, brilliant, and mean enough to survive New York's underground comedy circuit. Then a doctor gives her three months to live.
The diagnosis is glioblastoma. The odds are terrible. Frankie's first instinct is to refuse treatment, light a cigarette, and find out whether dying makes better material than living ever did.
Then, after one particularly disastrous set, she meets Paul Hayes, a once-promising singer whose body is being slowly dismantled by Parkinson's but whose voice can still stop a room. He is older, difficult, funny when he feels like it, and the first person to laugh at Frankie's jokes about dying.
What begins over whiskey and bad comedy becomes an unlikely friendship built from late-night records, Staten Island ferries, radiation appointments, old songs, and the understanding that neither of them needs the other to pretend everything is going to be okay. As Frankie begins fighting for a life she had already decided was over, Paul is quietly reaching the opposite conclusion.
And somewhere between them, Frankie is forced to confront the possibility that a life does not have to be long, successful, or even particularly happy to matter to the people who shared it.
From Jack Chase, author of Made in America, Jokes About Suicide is a darkly funny, intimate story about death, friendship, and the terrible inconvenience of discovering you still want to live.
