Mother’s Day: Can She Talk?

Joan Rivers is having one last laugh.

Less than a year after her mother’s death, Melissa Rivers has written a biography of their relationship, available just in time for Mother’s Day. The idea for the book originated at Joan’s funeral, Melissa writes: “I was walking down the aisle of Temple Emanu-El, when a strange woman (who I later found out was to become my fabulous editor) pressed her card into my hand and made the international hand sign for ‘Call me!’ ”

Momentarily taken aback, Melissa, 47, asked herself, “What would my mother have done?” The answer: “Sell, baby, sell! This book would be a perfect Mother’s Day gift.”

It is easy to imagine Joan’s raspy laugh as she might have mouthed that joke — maybe early in her career, on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” or perhaps later, palling around with celebrities on the red carpet, alongside her daughter.

For Melissa, writing “The Book of Joan: Tales of Mirth, Mischief, and Manipulation” (released May 5 by Crown Archetype) “was extremely cathartic and gave me permission to laugh again,” she said during a phone interview. 

More a collection of vignettes than a traditional biography, “The Book of Joan” is a lighthearted account of a mother-daughter relationship. Steering clear of sentimentality, Melissa offers breezy comedic anecdotes, raunchy one-liners and, of course, her mother’s advice on flying on airplanes, falling in love and gift-giving (see sidebar for Melissa’s “Tips on Mother’s Day Gifts,” influenced by her own attempts to satisfy Joan).

Melissa reveals her mother “was a stickler for manners,” that she used to hide money in empty Milk Duds boxes while traveling, and that she had a lifelong obsession with death. When Melissa was a kid, “[M]y mother would read part of an obituary in the paper, and I’d have to guess facts about the deceased.”

Joan also was a terrible speller but a stickler for grammar. She hated public restrooms. She enjoyed needlepointing slogans onto family pillows. Her first-grade teacher wrote on her report card: “Joan’s voice is still loud, and she tries to gain attention this way.”

Her teachers, it seems, were never able to lower her volume. In fact, Joan only became brassier and more brazen as time went on — a trait her daughter seems to have inherited. Also, Joan was “the only other person that I could look at and know what we were both trying to say or that we saw the same thing,” Melissa said during the interview. “ I miss having that inside-joke moment.”

Throughout the book, the brash sense of humor shared by Joan and Melissa often emerges in jokes about Judaism. Remember, Joan’s birth name was Joan Molinsky, and her longtime husband, Melissa’s father, was Edgar Rosenberg.

Joan raised Melissa in a home that was culturally Jewish, although not religious. Culturally Jewish “in the sense of the tight bonds of family, and the unity of being a part of something,” Melissa recalled during a follow-up interview.

But more than anything, Judaism meant comedy. “Jews are the funniest,” Melissa added.

On the first day of third grade, Melissa writes in the book, all the kids in her class had to share a little about themselves. Joan had trained her on what to say: “I’m Melissa Rosenberg, and I’m single, and I’d like to meet a nice Jewish boy with liquid assets and a good nose.”

In one of the book’s more revealing moments, Melissa notes that the cause of Joan’s “obsession with appearances was that for most of her life she was never happy with how she looked, which fed into her sense of being ‘less than.’ ”

According to Melissa, Joan’s feelings of inferiority stemmed from a childhood of always being second-best in comparison with her sister.

Joan later turned this feeling into an innovative style of self-deprecating humor now known as “over-sharing.” But despite all the jokes Joan made about her own plastic surgery, and all the jokes made at her expense, “I find comfort in knowing that … she did what she needed to do to feel better,” Melissa writes.

Late in her career, Joan starred with Melissa on WE tv’s “Joan & Melissa: Joan knows Best?” for which the two shared the screen during countless red carpet events. Melissa also executive produces “Fashion Police,” which her mother co-hosted.

But nothing brought mother and daughter closer together than Melissa giving birth to her son, Cooper, who is now 14.

“Nothing else will compare to that,” Melissa said during the interview, adding, “He was her favorite accessory.”

Despite the humor — or, at times, the attempt at humor — it was clear throughout the interview and book how deeply Melissa cared for her mother, and that Joan’s unexpected death last year is something with which she is still struggling.

“I’m lost as a performer right now, but I will find my own voice,” she writes. “I was taught by the best.”

Melissa’s ‘Tips on Mother’s Day Gifts’

As both a daughter and a mother, I’ve learned a thing or two about giving good (read: appropriate) Mother’s Day gifts. Here are a few suggestions that I hope will help you in the coming years:

Never, ever, ever — I don’t care what kind of pressure you’re under, even if Dick Cheney’s standing over you with his waterboarding kit — give your mother a vacuum, a Salad Shooter, or any household item that either requires her to work or can be construed as self-serving. For example, you say, “Happy Mother’s Day, Mom! Here’s your new washer-dryer.” What she hears is “I’m thirty-five, not getting married anytime soon, and have no intention of doing my own laundry.” I learned this the hard way. I once bought my mother a steam iron for Mother’s Day. She thanked me by “allowing” me to sleep in the maid’s room for a week.

Buy something. Making a jewelry box out of Popsicle sticks is adorable — if you’re 7. If you’re old enough to be tried as an adult, you’re old enough to put together a couple of bucks and hit a mall.

Buy something that will make your mother feel good — a pair of fun, not-too-cheap earrings; a day of beauty at a local spa; a box of chocolates that says to her, “I Love You More Than My Birth Mom.”

Buy her something she’ll always remember — like a framed photo of the two of you together, or an autographed copy of a book by her favorite author, or a gift certificate for a consultation with the world’s best divorce lawyer.

Don’t buy a gift with an agenda. Last year my mother bought me three beautiful picture frames — complete with the photos of the lovely couples that had come with the frames. And in each photo, she’d cut out the woman’s face and taped my face in its place. Forget thoughtfulness; think of the effort that went into making that gift so special! I’m surprised the card didn’t read, “Happy
Single Mother’s Day!”

One addendum Melissa asked the Journal to include: “It probably doesn’t matter because she’s not going to like it anyway.”