A compelling memoir from Elizabeth Pryor, daughter of the late comedic legend Richard Pryor, grapples with her biracial identity, her relationship with the n-word, and the complexities of her father's love.

The day of her father's funeral, Elizabeth's mother handed her a beat-up leather briefcase and issued a warning: "Don't let anyone know you have this."

The briefcase, which belonged to Elizabeth's father, the late comedic genius Richard Pryor, was a time capsule of her father's comings and goings from late 1966 to early 1967, the months before she was born. Elizabeth dug through the bag for signs of connection, but instead found only invoices, memos, matchbooks, headshots, and two spiral notebooks filled with her dad's doodles and felt-penned notes. Disappointed, Elizabeth tucked the briefcase in her closet and didn't open it for the next fifteen years. The briefcase sat there in the dark, a symbol of the ways in which her famous father eluded her in plain sight.

Now a professor of Black history whose intellectual passion is the evolution of the N-word in American culture, Elizabeth returns to the contents of the briefcase, this time looking for how her father grappled in his comedy and his life with this quintessentially American word. Like her father had done with his comedy, Elizabeth challenges what we know about the N-word in her professional and her personal life. In doing so, she rediscovers her father, interrogates her own blackness, and finds something that upends everything she thought she knew about her father's legacy and her place within it.

There Will Be No Laughing In This House is a triumphant love story about the complicated expressions of a father's love, a mother's unrelenting drive to nurture that love, and a daughter's determination to understand exactly what that love means in a landscape riddled with racism, addiction, paranoia, self-loathing, and fame. It is a uniquely American story about a daughter, her father, and a word that has the power to make and unmake us.
About the Author: Elizabeth Pryor is the Associate Professor of History at Smith College and the award-winning author of The Etymology of [N-Word]: Resistance, Language, and the Politics of Freedom in the Antebellum North and a 2016 monograph entitled Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War. Her TED talk on the n-word inspired her memoir There Will Be No Laughing in This House--a meditation on biracial identity and her relationship with her father, comedic icon, Richard Pryor. She is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and on the Advisory Council for the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic.