Paul Scheer was abused as a child. His new memoir helped him reclaim 'the power of my voice for my childhood'

Paul Scheer knew he had a lot of funny childhood stories — the comedian (“The League,” “Black Monday”) had been regaling audiences with them for years on the podcast “How Did This Get Made?” with his wife, June Diane Raphael, and friend Jason Mantzoukas. But as a memoir reader, he understood that a collection of amusing anecdotes did not make a book. To create something worth reading, he’d “have to go deeper and tell the stories I’ve never really told,” Scheer, 48, said in a recent video interview from his Los Angeles home.

Those stories centered largely around the abuse he (and his mother) suffered at the hands of his stepfather and the fear and shame it caused, especially when his mom and dad didn’t step in to save him. Still, Scheer was adamant that his book not be therapy. “I’ve read books that almost feel too private.

I didn’t want that — I’d done that work before I started writing.” “Joyful Recollections of Trauma,” Scheer’s memoir-in-essays, blends the horrifying and the self-deprecatingly funny, often within the same chapter, sometimes within the same sentence. “Writing this was a process of refining and discovering what the book wanted to be,” Scheer said.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. How did writing the book change your understanding of your past and of yourself? These are all things that I knew about myself, but wrestling with details gave me a good point of view and actually helped me bring ce.