“Inspiring, tragic, and at times heart-rendingly funny.” —People

Unsentimental, unexpectedly funny, and incredibly honest, Tragedy Plus Period is a love letter to every family members which has ever experienced messy, complicated, or (also momentarily) magnificent.

Meet the Magnificent Cayton-Hollands, a trio of brilliant, acerbic teenagers from Denver, Colorado, who were going to change the world. Anna, Adam, and Lydia had been trained by their dad, a civil privileges lawyer, and mother, an investigative about Tragedy Plus Time: A Tragi-comic Memoir journalist, to identify injustice and have their hearts open to the universe—the nice, the bad, the heartbreaking (and, inadvertently, the anxiety-inducing as well as the obsessive-compulsive disorder-fueling).

Adam chose to meet existence’s difficult breaks and cruel realities with stand-up comedy; his older sister, Anna, selected law; while their youngest sister, Lydia, battled to find her place in the world. Gorgeous and whip-smart, Lydia was witty, incredibly sensitive, fiercely persistent, and always somewhat haunted. She and Adam bonded over humor from a young age, running skits within their basement and obsessing over shows of The Simpsons.

When Adam sunk right into a deep melancholy in college, it had been Lydia who was able to reach him and draw him away. But years afterwards as Adam’s profession takes off, Lydia’s very own depression overtakes her, and, though he tries, Adam can’t return the prefer. When she takes her own life, the family is normally devastated, and Adam throws himself into his stand-up, taking in, and rage. He problems with disturbing thoughts of Lydia’s loss of life and turns to EMDR therapy to take care of his post-traumatic stress disorder when he realizes there’s a difference between shedding and shedding it.

Adam Cayton-Holland is a tremendously talented article writer and comedian, uniquely poised to consider readers towards the sides of comedy and tragedy, brilliance and madness. Tragedy Plus Period is usually a revelatory, darkly funny, and poignant tribute to a lost sibling that may have you achieving for the phone to call your sibling or sister with the last page.