Father Joe by Tony Hendra

Father Joe by Tony Hendra

A key comic writer of the past three decades has created his most heartfelt and hard-hitting book. Father Joe is Tony Hendra's inspiring true story of finding faith, friendship, and family through the decades-long influence of a surpassingly wise Benedictine monk named Father Joseph Warrillow.

Like everything human, it started with sex. In 1955, fourteen-year-old Tony found himself entangled with a married Catholic woman. In Cold War England, where Catholicism was the subject of news stories and Graham Greene bestsellers, Tony was whisked off by the woman's husband to see a priest and be saved.

Yet what he found was a far cry from the priests he'd known at Catholic school, where boys were beaten with belts or set upon by dogs. Instead, he met Father Joe, a gentle, stammering, ungainly Benedictine who never used the words wrong or guilt, who believed that God was in everyone and that the only sin was selfishness. During the next forty years, as his life and career drastically ebbed and flowed, Tony discovered that his visits to Father Joe remained the one constant in his life--the relationship that, in the most serious sense, saved it.

From the fifties and his adolescent desire to join an abbey himself; to the sixties, when attending Cambridge and seeing the satire of Beyond the Fringe convinced him to change the world with laughter, not prayer; to the seventies and successful stints as an original editor of National Lampoon and a writer of Lemmings, the off-Broadway smash that introduced John Belushi and Chevy Chase; to professional disaster after co-creating the legendary English series Spitting Image; from drinking to drugs, from a failed first marriage to a successful second and the miracle of parenthood--the years only deepened Tony's need for the wisdom of his other and more real father, creating a bond that could not be broken, even by death.

A startling departure for this acclaimed satirist, Father Joe is a sincere account of how Tony Hendra learned to love. It's the story of a whole generation looking for a way back from mockery and irony, looking for its own Father Joe, and a testament to one of the most charismatic mentors in modern literature.

Tony Hendra was recently dubbed one of the most brilliant comic talents of the postwar century by The Independent of London. He began his comedic career with Monty Python's Graham Chapman, performed six times on the Ed Sullivan Show, was one of the founding editors of National Lampoon, edited the legendary spoof Not The New York Times, starred in This Is Spinal Tap, and co-created and co-produced With the exception of two New York Times bestsellers, Brotherhood (2001) and Father Joe (2004), he has written or edited dozens of books, the most of which are humorous. He serves on the Board of Directors of The Moth, a national story-telling organization.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780812972344
ISBN 10	0812972341
Title	Father Joe
Author	Tony Hendra
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	2005-05-31
Number of pages	304
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.