Tony Hendra
A key comic writer of the past three decades has created his most heartfelt and hard-hitting book. ,Father Joe, is Tony Hendraâ€™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 womanâ€™s husband to see a priest and be saved.,Yet what he found was a far cry from the priests heâ€™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 â€œwrongâ€ or â€œguilt,â€ who believed that God was in everyone and that â€œthe only sin was selfishness.â€ 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 lifeâ€”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 parenthoodâ€”the years only deepened Tonyâ€™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. Itâ€™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.,From the Hardcover edition.
Autobiography,Memoir,Nonfiction,Biography,Religion,Spirituality,Biography Memoir,Christianity,Catholic,Audiobook,Religion,Christianity,Christian
Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul