Good Grief, Pass the Bread, Mom Is Dead

Angela Nissel is author of the national bestselling comedic memoirs The Broke Diaries and Mixed, and a prolific television producer and writer whose credits include The Other Black Girl, Mixed-ish and Scrubs. Prior to her television career, she had illustrious careers as a temp for the IRS, a stripper, and a “sleep apnea auditor” watching people snore overnight in a local hospital. She lives in Los Angeles and enjoys beating people half her age in video games.

Good Grief, Pass the Bread, Mom is Dead signals the triumphant return of one of our most talented memoirists. Nobody prepared us to care for aging or ill parents, but Angela gives us extraordinary insight into her own journey rooted in a daughter’s unconditional love for her mother. And like she does with everything else, her vulnerability in these pages is shared with remarkable humor and heart. — Angela Rye, attorney and co-host of the award-winning Native Land PodGood Grief, Pass the Bread, Mom is Dead is an extraordinarily profound portrait of love, loss, and grief that everyone needs to read. Angela Nissel chronicles her difficult journey of caring for and eventually losing a parent to cancer with a candor that made me cry and an observational wit that left me in stitches. This is a heartfelt love letter not just to Nissel’s mother, but to a generation of hardworking black women who spent their lives playing by the rules without ever getting to sit back and enjoy the fruits of their labor. And it’s a perennial reminder to laugh and love on one another while we still can. — Zakiya Dalila Harris, bestselling author of The Other Black Girl“I confess: I was not prepared for the love, for the pain, for the anger, for the sorrow, for the sheer vivacious and unsparing (of anyone, herself very much included) honesty. This memoir is about life, holding on to it and letting go of it, and I was bowled over by the keen specificity of Nissel's narrative—she's a marvelously detailed painter of word portraits—and, by adroit extension, her ability to evoke the universal wonder of having a mother and of surviving one. And yes, if you're wondering: It's also, at times, extremely funny, sometimes full-out hilariously, sometimes full-out gut-punchingly." — Benjamin Dreyer, author of the New York Times bestseller Dreyer's English