Relative Discomfort: The Family Survival Guide

The family that eats together is the kind to avoid

Remember when loving your relatives meant liking them, too? If family is a four-letter word and seeing them at holidays is a necessary evil, it's time to call in the reinforcements.

Jeremy Greenberg feels your pain and has the manual to better your annual gatherings — Relative Discomfort: The Family Survival Guide(Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC, $14.99). He's been through it all, or at least heard about it: from mothers who answer the door with chicken leg in hand to country cousins who consider cordless phones a new invention, he's not hazy on what makes you crazy. Relative Discomfort offers up a survival guide for dealing with the downs and downers of weddings, bat mitzvahs, holidays, reunions, summertime barbecues and more. And if time is short between your workaholic schedule and catching that flight to Uncle Drunk's house, get some inspiration from snippets of insight at the end of each chapter.

Survival tips:

You don't need to drink ahead of time if your family bonds through booze.
Let's teach kids that the real spirit of the holiday is giving, by having them give us a hand.
Being polite is different than being helpful. Just ask any Home Depot employee.
It is always preferable to call on Mother's or Father's Day instead of visiting. In fact, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone just so he could get out of seeing Ma Bell.

Maybe you never thought you'd feel better about spending time with your family, but Relative Discomfort can remedy that. Or, at the very least, you'll feel much better about feeling worse.

About Jeremy Greenberg

Jeremy Greenberg is a writer and comic born in New York, raised in the Bay Area, and currently making his home in Seattle. He has been a contributor to The Complete Idiot's Guide to Jokes (Alpha/Penguin) and a contributing joke writer for Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen. This is his first book. When Jeremy isn't writing or traveling the globe performing stand-up, he is at home with his wife and twin sons. Learn more at www.jeremygreenberg.com.

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