I really loved this memoir! Admittedly, i was not familiar with the author when i started reading, but i typically love a memoir. She is a comedian but the book is super well written and i found myself laughing and being entertained throughout. It definitely has serious topics and a more serious tone, but the author's voice really brings it to life.

A funny and insightful novel about growing up. Religion was a central theme in this book (often a turn off for me), told in a funny, sometimes irreverent tone. A story of family, forgiveness, lies, and adventure! I enjoyed this book.


** I received an electronic ARC from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review of this book

Sara Schaefer was only in grade school when her life was turned upside down by a family scandal. Already a cautious child, Schaefer became even more vigilant (her middle school nickname was, hilariously, “Grandma”) in the face of this formative experience. The rapid shifting of her day to day existence exacerbates her anxiety, but it also gifts Schaefer an ironclad sense of humor that serves as a shield against life’s difficult circumstances. This talent for wit in the face of hardship serves her well in her chosen profession of comedy. She carves out dizzying career success while experiencing crushing grief at the loss of a parent and, soon after, her marriage. We also embark on a parallel journey with the author: a white-knuckle river rafting trip through the Grand Canyon. Meant to celebrate a milestone birthday, this pilgrimage becomes a means to examine the shame Sara’s carried for so many years. Her companion on the expedition is her sister, and together they unpack their shared familial grief with breathtaking candor. Grand is a memoir within a memoir that leaves you rooting for its subject. I found myself laughing, then tearing up as I reflected on my own ramble through life. The magic of inviting your reader to see herself in your story is the hallmark of any well-written autobiographical work. Schaefer achieves this nimbly. Her debut delights --and more than lives up to its title.

PLEASE NOTE: THIS REVIEW IS AN UNEDITED VERSION SUBMITTED FOR UPCOMING PUBLICATION TO BUST MAGAZINE AND IS SUBJECT TO CHANGES PER THE EDITORIAL STAFF.

I could not put this book down. The way that the author wove the story about her Grand Canyon trip with stories from her life growing up was well incorporated and had a good flow. Memoirs and personal stories are my favorite genre of book, and this falls into my favorites list.

I loved this memoir. Sara Schaefer, a comedian, told us the story of a childhood secret coming to light and figuring out what the new normal looked like, all while also telling the story of her rafting the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. Oh yeah, and she has an huge fear of water. It made for an interesting tale and a ton of life lessons.

A busy, busy memoir! I can't resist memoirs and I especially can't resist ones about families that are what I think of as a "cult of one" where the family lives by such a bizarre set of rules or giant family secret they are outside of regular society yet not necessarily under the thrall of a outside charismatic leader.

I would have liked a little more detail about some of the events in the book. I felt like it kept coming back to the Grand Canyon trip but that wasn't the most interesting part of the book. I wanted to know more about their day to day life and interactions with people in the past. There was just a little too much rafting content for me. The family was interesting, water currents, not quite as much.

There is a lot going on in Sara Schaefer’s memoir. She unpacks a large family secret and its impact on her, she details other episodes in her life, she attempts to keep up her comedic persona, and writes about vacationing with family members in a contrived setting to help her hash out her past. While the primary story, of the family secret, was particularly interesting, the rest was hit and miss. And, her conversational writing style didn’t fully work for me.

It was really easy to be sympathetic with the author. Her story is compelling and her writing is engaging. In the end, I felt like I wish I would've known more of her story. The Grand Canyon adventure was significant, but I need more to 'connect the dots' in a more meaningful way. That said, I still really enjoyed this and would recommend it!

I’m a little hesitant with biographies, finding quite a few filled with humble brags and trumped up drama. But Schaefer’s Grand is the rare exception. You feel her joy and pain and every experience in between. Dysfunctional families may be the norm as of late, but it’s rare that the dysfunction is what brings people together. Poignant stories like an experience with a hospice nurse give the reader a unique glimpse at what we all experience.

Sara Schaefer looks anxious.

If you've ever seen stand-up comedian and writer Sara Schaefer, it's hard to deny that she carries the aura of someone who has lived a little, laughed a little, loved a little, and worries about it all.

Schaefer is also funny - really, really funny.

"Grand: A Memoir," scheduled for release by Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster on August 11th, captures both sides of Schaefer and much more in a self-penned journey through the Emmy Award-winning writer's past and present beginning with a childhood that included a scandal that changed the family forever and ultimately culminating in Schaefer's 40th birthday celebration whitewater rafting trip down the Colorado River with her younger sister, Ross.

"Grand" is at its best when Schaefer is exploring the rawness of her life's extremes, whether that be the often poignant yet hilarious challenges of camping with a group of wildly different strangers or the complicated grief over her mother's death that seems to finally bubble up to the surface during Schaefer's way out of her comfort zone trip with her sister. Schaefer isn't hesitant to delve into the darkness of her father's financial scandal, a scandal that cost him a career, the family a grander life, and seemed to detour the entire family's life away from their previous secularism into a committed religious life. She's also not hesitant to talk about her rise to fame as a popular writer/comedian/podcaster and how that fame fueled the flames of an already disintegrating marriage and her own choices that turned an inevitable but likely amicable divorce into a more complicated, highly conflicted one.

Schaefer shares it all. She shares it with heart and humor and honesty and even a few tears. She shares what it's like to experience sexism in the workplace, sexual harassment pretty much everywhere, and rough sex that probably crossed the line.

It was in first grade that Sara told what she believed to be an innocent lie. Of course, the lie was discovered and led to the first of many "dad-isms" over the years, advice that one lie leads to another and soon you find yourself in a hole from which you can't escape. First grade Sara didn't realize how true her father's words were until years later when his own lie, an at first seemingly innocent effort to maintain the family's rather grand Midlothian, Virginia lifestyle, would come crashing down.

Yet, in many ways the truth did set Sara's family free and this is a lesson that has seemingly never been lost on Sara. For the remainder of Sara's childhood, a former upper-middle class lifestyle became more of a working class one with father Billy, mother Billie, and siblings Sara, Ross, Jay, and Cristy immersing themselves in their faith and in serving others. While "Grand" laughs at many of those dad-isms, it's equally true that Sara has come to embrace them over the years even as her family's abrupt transformation seemed to trigger her own obsessive, anxious personality.

By the time Sara reaches 40, she's won two Emmy Awards for her work as Head Blogger for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and acquired a variety of accolades from being named one of USA Today's "100 People of the Year in Pop Culture" to being cited by New York Magazine as "One of the Ten New Comedians that Funny People Find Funny."

Yet, it's obvious from the pages of "Grand: A Memoir" that Schaefer, whom I can't seem to decide if I want to call Sara or Schaefer, remained unresolved about her life, her loves, her family, and the anxiety/depression that seems to have been a consistent if not entirely constant companion that grew in intensity following the death of her mother.

So, it's that 40th year that is at the heart and soul of "Grand," a 40th year that finds Schaefer taking a 1:1 trip with each of her family members up to and culminating in this wildly adventurous trip through the Grand Canyon with her sister, her guides, several other interesting characters, and more than a few animals along the way.

The stories that unfold are filled with Schaefer's brand of enthusiastic and honest humor grounded in real life, though she infuses that humor with vulnerability and honesty and a rawness that comes alive because she paints the truthfulness of her relationships and her own human foibles so completely.

At times, you can't help but laugh with her. You also, at times, can't help but laugh at her. You'll cry a little bit, want to protect her more than a little bit, but mostly you'll find that "Grand" simply showcases the humanity and life experiences that helped turn her into one of America's brightest and most gifted stand-up comics and comedy writers.

Sara's relationship with her mother is, perhaps, one of the most amazing parts of "Grand" because it captures so beautifully the weird and wonderful relationship between mother and daughter. Billie, who loved the middle-upper class existence she enjoyed with her family in Midlothian, embraced her working class existence and, in fact, would eventually start the non-profit Pennies From Heaven, Inc., a non-profit devoted to serving those even less fortunate. There are moments in "Grand" when you can't help but mumble to yourself "I want that mom!" and, indeed, Sara seems wonderfully in touch with the good, the bad, the challenging, and the pretty amazing parts of growing up with her quirky yet lovable tribe.

"Grand" is at its best when it feels spontaneous and alive in the moment. There are other moments in "Grand" that feel overly processed, as if Schaefer perhaps spent just a little too much time finding the perfect wording or searching for the punchline in a story that didn't necessarily need one. In these moments, "Grand" feels just a bit flat and lacks the spark that much of the book, and easily the majority of the book, carries. These are minor concerns, really, for what is, without a grand memoir centered on a grand journey that brought Schaefer closer to her sister and seems to have opened up parts of her that continue to fuel her continued growth in the comedy world.

Humorous and heartfelt, honest and often emotionally exhilarating, "Grand: A Memoir" is a wonderful story about self-talk and self-identity, the stories that made us and the stories that we grow into in our lives. It's a memoir you will most assuredly remember.

As someone who loves an adrenaline-pumping adventure, I enjoyed reading Sara's experience traveling down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. Many of her character descriptions and boating scenes cracked me up. She's extremely talented at writing humor.

I also appreciated her ability to transition seamlessly through a broad spectrum of emotions. One minute, I was laughing as I read about the drama of camping with a large group of strangers. The next moment, I was crying as I read about Sara's mom dying. Sara dives into the raw, painful moments: her dad's financial scandal, her mom's cancer, her own divorce, her experience of sexism in the workplace, and her struggle to find her identity in the professional comedy industry.

My one critique of this book is that a few portions of Sara's inner dialogue seemed too edited and forced. I kept feeling skeptical that she had some of those exact thoughts in the moment; they felt like polished musings she wrote in afterward. I wanted to see her character wrestle with messier, unfiltered thoughts for a while before finding cohesive meaning in her experiences.

Overall, it was a fascinating memoir that made me feel a broad spectrum of emotions and satisfied my desire for a literary adventure.

I received an ARC copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I hate you, Sara, for getting into my head and writing my story. You have no idea how this book connected with me and my life. My sister and I have a Grand Canyon connection. My Ross and I planned to hike into the canyon or do the rafting trip, but she got cancer and died. The closest we came was a trip on the Grand Canyon Railway to the South Rim and a short hike down to get a feel for the grandeur and the challenge, when the real challenge was getting her through chemo. We never did our trip, but I lived it through yours. Your honesty about growing up, your nutso family, religious ambiguity, teen insecurity, struggles with peers and siblings, we can all identify with something there. You revealed your innermost thoughts about college and the girls in the dorm, experimenting with sex and drinking and life. You took us back to our early single years and we cheered your success. I had no idea you were such a successful comedian, and when it was revealed, I loved you even more for being so real. Marriage, infidelity, divorce, career risks. No pretension. What a wonderful real-life allegory weaving the Grand trip with your life, well done. Let's all jump off more cliffs. You first.

Thank you #Netgalley for the advanced copy!

I had heard of Sara from the Nikki and Sara show on MTV, though I did not know much about her. After reading this memoir, I want to know more! Loved the style of this book, jumping back and forth from her past and a current grand canyon river rafting trip. Though Sara is a comic and seems so care free, this memoir shows the struggles she has experienced and how she has evolved. I loved the idea of taking each family member on a one on one trip for her birthday. This memoir follows the trip she took with her sister to camp in the grand canyon, something neither of them have done but push each other out of their comfort zone. I really enjoyed this book and want more from the author :)

I really enjoyed this book. The writing is outstanding. It is funny, heartfelt and engaging. The descriptions of the Grand Canyon and the trip are well done. This was a quick lovely read. Would definitely recommend. Thank you to NetGalley and Gallery Books for granting access to this book. I will be posting this review tomorrow to my Bookstagram and companion Facebook page @thatreadingrealtor.

"Grand" by Sara Schaefer (a stand up comic, and TV writer and blogger) takes the reader on an honest, sad, uplifting and funny trip down the Grand Canyon and throughout her life.

Schaefer and her sister decide to reconnect by signing up for a guided trip through the Grand Canyon. As she faces her fears of wild animals, new people and white water rapids, she also reconciles events from her past, including the death of her mother (which could be a TW for some) and the scandal which changed her life as a child. Schaefer grew up believing in Jesus, trying to always do the right thing, and suffering from anxiety as she tried to manage the realities of life and continuing to be the "good" vs "normal" girl.

I enjoyed Schaefer's honesty, her humor, and the cultural references to growing up in the '80s and '90s. I loved reading about a close family who survived hard times and continued to support and love each other. The chapters alternated between the Grand Canyon trip and the events of Sara Schaefer's life which made the book fun to read.

If you enjoy memoirs with cultural references and humor I recommend this book. You do not have to have followed Sara Schaefer's career in order to enjoy it! (There are some sexual references and crude language which could be offensive to some.)