Carol Burnett, One More Time. The TV comedienne’s 1986 memoir of her impoverished childhood and youth, a painful story (her parents were alcoholics, her grandmother a bizarre eccentric) told simply and without a trace of self-pity. Page after page of One More Time contains stingingly plain-spoken sentences that leap off the page and embed themselves in the memory: “The war was one giant movie we all were starring in.” “He was sick in a charity hospital.” “Those were the times they didn’t fight.” “The worst was Christmas.” Who knew, or even suspected, that Burnett could write so well? Not me (TT).
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
