Did he feel that the community had not done a good job and i think he was relieved that i didnt turn out to be a criminal or a drug addict. I wanted to tell you its been wonderful having you here in austin. Stories i tell myself makes a Great Fathers day gift. Also, we appreciate you opening up your heart and sharing the stories and the kind of candor that you bring to it and its been a wonderful experience doing this with you. Thank you. [applause] a few of you have other questions so he will be doing the book signing so come up and get a copy. Thank you book tv for hosting us. [inaudible conversation] book tv is in private time every night in august with a series of programs focusing on a new subject. Wednesday evening a focus on 20th century u. S. History. Throughout this month we are showing book tv programs in prime time. In case you are not familiar, book to be on cspan2 takes our Public Affairs programming and focuses on the latest Nonfiction Book releases through author interviews and book discussions. Our signature programs are indepth, its a life three audit were look at and authors look. Indepth errors the first sunday of every month at noon eastern. After words is a oneonone conversation between an author of a newly released Nonfiction Book in the interviewer who is either a german list, Public Policy maker our legislature familiar with the topic. We will take you across the country where authors talk about their latest books. Book tv is the only National Network devoted to Nonfiction Books. Television for serious readers. Our focus on memoirs continues on book tv. Now look into the private life of comedian George Carlin. This is about an hour 20 minutes house the Water Quality . Should we first discussed this . It seems to be a big topic here in the country. We are waiting on our queue. I dont know what that means. We will go ahead and get started. The morning. Thank you all for coming. Today i think you will enjoy this very much. My name is josh wheeler and i am the director of the Thomas Jefferson center. We are the host of this program tonight. Its a source of great pride for us at the center that this is the 22nd virginia festival of the book. The center has been involved in one way or another with all 22 festivals. This is something that we hope to continue to do for many years to come because i think one of the best ways to combat censorship or the desire to censor a speech we dont like is to remind people of the many benefits that we received from free speech. By having this kind of festival celebrating the right of free speech, it is the way to remind folks that its a small price to pay when we sometimes hear something we might not want to hear. All the benefits of being able to explore any concept without any fear of government reprisal. Hooray for the First Amendment. I know 22 years ago it was in this room i discovered i needed to wear glasses because at some point i found myself doing this number where they would asked me to read some housekeeping details so i would bring this up and i asked that you be patient with me with my glasses on. I do want to tell you that this is the virginia festival of the book which is the product of the Virginia Foundation for the humanities. Ive been asked to ask everyone in the audience to please silence their cell phones, not just for us but this is going to be reported and if you would like to tweet about this event, you can do so at va book 2016 and i say that as if i have any idea what that means. If youre going to tweet about this event, include me at kelly, underscore carlin. She could be speaking a foreign language. I have no idea. Kelly is a very proficient tweeter. How many followers do you have now . Almost 30,000. Supporting the festival. Its free of charge, not free of cost. Please remember to go online and give back or pick up a giving envelope from the information desk and support your festival so we can sustain it for many years to come. Please fill out program evaluations. This is useful information to help keep the festival free and open to the public. After this event, at the end of this program we will have books available for sale right down here and we will have our author sign a copy if you would like. We are here today to talk about this book. A carlin home companion, growing growing up with george. Well talk a little bit about that in the future. The center has been involved in many of these programs. Ive had the great leisure to moderate them, a number of them. I realize though, probably the third or fourth time that people werent here to hear me. They were actually more interested in hearing about the book or the author and so i have learned that the best questions actually come from the audience themselves. I am going to very early on stop asking the questions and make the envelope, make the microphone available to you folks and we will bring the microphone around to anybody who has a question. I told kelly that i can ask questions that if this audience doesnt have any but i have never found that to be a problem. And i can blah blah blah for anyone. Me tell you a little bit about our author today. Kelly carlin has written for film, tv and most recently the stage. Her critically acclaimed solo show, her masters degree in counseling psychology from the graduate institute informs her work as an author, speaker, workshop leader and citizen. She lives in l. A. With her husband and their jack russell terrier stella. The dreams of living somewhere with a lot fewer cars someday. As long as you avoid 29 north i think charlottesville will be perfect. We you join me in welcoming kelly carlin. [applause] i should also say, im very proud of the fact that she has on the Thomas Jefferson ctr. Board of trustees peerage she is a strong believer in free speech and we are thrilled to have her to help direct the centers efforts. But, first question, what compels you to write your book . Well its interesting, ive been wanting to write and tell my story for about 15, well now that would be 17 years. Its funny how the time does that. My mom died in 97 and after she died pretty suddenly and pretty quickly she was diagnosed with liver cancer and dead five weeks later. It was a huge shock and wakeup call for me as a human and an artist. I had this wild and crazy life. I was 3435 at the time and i had already felt like i have lived seven lives. I wanted to tell my story, my survivor story because at 35 i was a very different person than i was at 25 or at 20 or a 15 or at ten. Theres just so many different iterations of my life with my family and my life as an adult or what i was pretending to be an adult at least. I wanted to tell my survivor story and i knew yes, okay, its a little interesting, i happened to be George Carlins daughter and part of my story is quite fun with my dad and my mom in the 60s and 70s and in the 80s and all the way through until my dads death, but my parents had drug and alcohol issues when i was a child until i was 12 my mother was an alcoholic and almost died, she got sober. There was a lot of money and cocaine and fame in my house and all the weird stuff that comes along with that and some Great Stories along with that that maybe ill share today. I have lived through that, our family lived through that, my mothers Breast Cancer my fathers heart disease, i had gotten involved in abusive relationships, my own drug addiction, panic attacks and i have been through a lot of stuff. I felt that because i had gotten through it and found a way to get my feet back on the ground and find my center that i really wanted to share that with the world. I wanted to pay it forward in some way. I was so lucky to grow up in the family i grew up in even though it was chaotic for many years but i understood my privilege. I wanted to share that. I wanted to share my experience, strength and hope. Thats part of the reason why i wanted wanted to write the book. Now that ive written it and ive been sitting with it and looking back on it and talking a lot about it, i also see that being an only child, growing up in the shadow of fame, growing up in a family where the adults chaos was in charge of my life until i was 12 years old, he didnt feel like i had a real voice or place in the worlds and i see now that telling my story is away for me to heal that and say i exist, im here, i matter like we all do. Every single one of us has a story to tell so i can see on some level thats one of the themes in the book, invisibility, visibility is one of the themes i talk about. I see now thats part of it, something about being seen and heard which all children want ultimately. Here i am being seen and heard big time. I want this program to be very much about your books because its a fascinating book as you say, its a survivors tail but a big part of that is your parents. Youre a writer and youve written for stage and screen and publications and i can only assume that you inherited that in some part from your father who loved the written word. I actually inherited it from the carlin family itself. Thats what i was going to ask. Did it start with your father . Theres a great story in the book about perhaps where he got his love. Yes, i have to to find out where that story is. The carlin family were irish, gift of the gap and all that stuff. My dads father, my dad didnt really know his father, his father couldnt metabolize ethanol very well as my father used to say and when he wasnt drinking he was a brilliant man. He was a bring big advertising guy in new york city and sold advertising for all the big papers, Like National level salesman, brilliant salesman and also one speaking contest, Dale Carnegie carnegie and stuff like that. National speaking awards, he had a real gift for it. My dad never knew him because my dads mother mary, when my dad was about three months old took my father and his older brother patrick and snuck down the fire escape because she was tired of being battered around by patrick senior and patrick senior had started beating around Young Patrick and she wanted to protect my father from that. So mary was also an amazing storyteller. She was someone who would take a bus ride downtown and back uptown and have a full story about who was on the bus, beginning, middle and and, punchline and the whole story. She was a very funny and witty woman. Theres a story here of my dad, here, ill just read a little bit. On may 12, 1937, George DennisPatrick Carlin was born. Eight weeks later after months of trying to make the marriage work, mary sneaked out of the fire escape in the middle of the night with her two young boys leaving Patrick Carlin senior and his rage for good. She had seen the damage that her husband had already done to little patrick and she was not going to let sweet george be another victim. This time it stuck. She tried to leave him a few times before. Even though patrick tried to woo her back, she held strong. George never saw his dad again. In 1945 his father died of a massive heart attack at the age of 57. My dad was eight years old. Without a man around to keep my dad out of trouble on the streets of the Upper West Side of manhattan, or what he and his friends like to call irish harlem, mary took her job as both mother and father very seriously. She looked for ways to shape and control Young Georges mind in life. She succeeded in only one area, a love of language and words. Mary encouraged my dad to look at words he didnt know in the dictionary and use them in conversation. One morning young george, wanting to show off a new word he had learned excitedly asked his mother if she had perused the paper that morning. Anticipated her approval. Slowly she turned, sharpened her gaze onto him and said i have not. Actually ive only given it a cursory glance. George sure grand, turned around and marched right back to the dictionary to learn the new word should cursory. She loved to have the upper hand in every situation but she did. She encouraged my dads love of of language big time. My dad encouraged me as well with the love of language. He used to do this thing well into my 30s which was very irritating, if i was with him and we were with people in conversation and i would pronounce a word wrong he would slip me a piece of paper later with the correct pronunciation written out like it does in the dictionary. I get it, dad was trying to protect me and make sure i sounded smart but in your 30s, at some point youre like dad, im just feeling a little, not so great about that. Id love to read a little bit of the beginning of my book to jump back a little bit. Theres something about my life that has always felt faded in some way and i just want to read a little bit about that. Carlin legend holds that all it took for me to come in to the world was a little sperm, little egg, little scotch, a little weed and something called the limbo. Weve been trying to get pregnant for months with no luck explained my mom to me, 7yearold kelly waiting for my dad to pack. Ill get a postcard from the hotel you were conceived in and send it to you. By the word conceived, i looked at my mom and she quickly filled in the details. You see, we were down in new orleans, it mustve been october 62. We were at a club hanging out with some musicians we met when someone announced the limbo contest. It sounded like fun and so i did it. Next thing i knew i was pregnant mom didnt mention the weed or the scotch in her telling of my fateful beginning because she didnt need to. They were given. Dad had been smoking weed and drinking beer since he was 14 and mom started sneaking sips of her daddys drink around the same age. As far as the limbo go, im not sure about the mechanics of it all but it didnt matter. It clearly worked and i am here. For the two years leading up to the night of limbo, my mom mom and my dad had been constant companions, starving artists and comrades in arms chasing my dads comedy dreams. They did held gigs, packed and unpack their suitcases hundreds of times and traveled to almost every state in the country in their 57 dodge dart. My mom loved playing the role of on the road partner in crime to my dads rebel artist on a mission mission. She was dads lover, party girl and press agent all rolled into one. His full partner in life and always his best audience. You could always hear her great laugh above the den of clinking glasses and mumbling patrons in every club they visited. Because dad was a complete unknown, on on some nights she was the only person in the audience. One night in baltimore no one was in the audience. Not even my mom. My dad asked the club owner, exactly why am i going on and he said because you know, if people come in i want them them to know we have some entertainment. I hear dad killed that night. During those lean years, dad paid his dues but also got lucky. One night lenny bruce caught his act in chicago, loved what he saw and introduced him to his manager, marie becker. This was huge. My dad worshiped lenny. Taking every opportunity to soak up lennys presence, my, my mom and dad would drive from new york to the horn club in chicago just to see him perform. One night while they were there, lenny got arrested halfway through his set. This had become the norm. That night the cops did not like the use of his word, ill not say that because were doing tv here. Lets say a very descriptive word. Looking to hassle the club, the cops began to ask everyone for their ids. When they they got to my dad he defiantly told them yeah, i dont believe in identification. In the cops promptly threw him into the back of the paddy wagon with lenny. When my dad proudly told lenny what he had done lenny looked at him and said what are you mark . My mom chased that paddy wagon by foot all the way to the Police Station that night and bailed them out of jail. Growing up surrounded by stories like these and living through many others myself, ive always felt that my familys journey has unfolded like some kind of mythological legend. Our lives together have felt shaped by a forge or maybe even what my dad calls the big electron. Something was calling us fourth and interweaving exactly the right People Places and things to form one amazing life together. It just always seemed so dustin. So maybe we should talk a little bit about the First Amendment. What . I do want to do that and we can talk about that now or id like to talk about the next phase after your conception, one of the things i love about, so i will definitely talk about how we met and i want to share that anecdote but one of the things i love about your book is, did you spend some time on the chapters . Of course, i think one of the enlightening terms is the three mex musketeers. That chapter. That part of your life. I thought maybe you could share a little bit about that. Absolutely. I was in only child so there only three of us and early on, at some point, my, my dad began calling us the three musketeers. All for one, one for all and that became a real theme well, when youre an only child of a tightknit family, you feel like it sometimes the three of you against the world and it fell like that sometimes in our own lives, especially in the 70s when my dad was considered a hippie freak and it felt like the whole world was against us on some level but this also became a theme in our life in a sense that if you grow up in a dysfunctional family, and im sure none of you here can understand what im talking about, theres a sense of loyalty to your family that happens and theres a willingness to keep your family secrets for your family and keep them protected because you love them and its the right thing to do in the moment because you want to protect your families reputation and you dont want to tell strangers whats going on at your house. Theres this sense of that in my family and there was some crazy stuff going on in our household, im just looking here for a little bit of this. It was a great sense of belonging in that way. It also kept our alcoholic family secret and i dont think helped us in the long run. A lot of crazy stuff went on in my house around that but theres a warmth to it that i do love and adore and actually i went to my book launch in l. A. , someone came to me and gave me a little hot wheels car that had the three musketeers on it. Its on my little altar. I covered it so much. I like to give a little read