With his signature matter-of-fact humor, comedian and musician Dave Hill explores his increasingly close relationship with his recently widowed father in a series of painfully funny essays you will want to read again and again by the fire, at the beach, in a truck stop men’s room, or just about anywhere. It’s your call, really.
These days, Dave has just the right amount of spare time to write books at home, preferably in his underwear, but things weren’t always perfect. When he found himself pushing thirty while still living with his parents in Cleveland, unsuited for anything but what an “employment expert” vaguely called a career in “art, music, writing, or entertainment,” he decided to visit some friends in New York for the weekend and never left. However, getting his life together wasn’t as easy as he’d hoped, and even an illegally subletted, rent controlled fifth-floor walk-up studio apartment with a (for the most part) working toilet wasn’t glamorous enough to erase the fact that his four siblings were all married with steady jobs and actual human offspring. And in recent years, Dave’s father had grown tired of loaning him cash and living alone in the empty family home, neither of which made much sense to Dave, but whatever.
Through the process of his father’s eventual move to a retirement community, Dave and his dad bonded over the things in life that really matter: scorching-hot rock jams, the gluten allergy craze, eighteen-wheelers, Italian food (pizza and spaghetti), and whatever else could possibly be left after that. Meanwhile, Dave discovered his late-blooming manhood via experiences as disparate and dangerous as a visit to a remote Mexican prison, where he learned that people everywhere love the Eagles, and a martial arts class that pushed his resolve and his groin to their limit. In Dave Hill Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Hill’s voice is sharp, carefree, laced with just the right amount of profanity, and he is—seemingly despite himself—deeply empathetic as he portrays a difficult time in his family’s life and grows up just enough to realize that maybe he and his dad aren’t so different after all.