A special book about the end of one life and the beginning of another.
Life's That Way is a modern-day Book of Job. In August 2003, Jim Beaver, a character actor whom many know from the popular HBO series Deadwood, and his wife Cecily learned what they thought was the worst news possible- their daughter Maddie was autistic. Then six weeks later the roof fell in-Cecily was diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer.
Jim immediately began writing a nightly e-mail as a way to keep more than one hundred family and friends up to date about Cecily's condition. Soon four thousand people a day, from all around the world, were receiving them. Initially a cathartic exercise for Jim, the prose turned into an unforgettable journey for his readers.
Cecily died four months after being diagnosed, but Jim continued the e-mails for a year after her diagnosis, revealing how he and Maddie coped with Cecily's death and how they managed to move forward. Life's That Way is a compilation of those nightly e-mails. Jim's experience is universal for anybody who has lost a loved one. But Life's That Way is not solely about loss. It is an immediate, day-by-day account of living through a nightmare but also of discovering the joy of a child, of being on the receiving end of unthinkable kindness, and of learning to navigate life anew. As Jim says, these are hard-won blessings. But then again, life's that way.
"To have known and read this man over these years, reveals to me I knew nothing of what love could and should be." --Edward Asner
"When this journal first appeared, I learned to keep a jumbo-size box of tissues at the ready. You will cry-- and laugh--as Jim unwraps his unvarnished heart and soul. It will evoke memories of everyone who ever touched your heart and remind you to talk from your heart to the people who mean something to you." --Russell Friedman, coauthor of The Grief Recovery Handbook and When Children grieve
"Jim Beaver, the laconic character actor best known as the appealing prospector, "Ellsworth," on Deadwood has written a compassionate, funny, searing, and ultimately transcending memoir chronicling a year of tragedy, grief, and survival that would send the strongest of men, even an ex-marine and West Texas preacher's son, to their knees. As Jim puts it, "I'm no Job - though I think we went to the same school." That his story is so compulsively readable, inspiring, and ultimately hopeful is due entirely to Jim's bracing honesty, dry humor, and deeply felt humanity. Read this book, tell your friends about it, and then go hug your loved ones." --Robert Schenkkan, Pulitzer Prize winner for The Kentucky Cycle.
"Life's That Way is a gift of a book and one that will join Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking as a classic exploration of love and grief. It removes the clinical and focuses on the personal, revealing that "there's no end to the new ways one can experience such a cataclysm," and shows that, unbelievable as it is, life does go on. And we go with it. "I can't recommend this book highly enough. It will give you pause to reflect on your own relationships and experiences and to think about what your commitments really mean, and it will remind you that even in the worst of situations, people have a wonderful way of reaching out to help and support each other in astonishingly simple and profound ways. 5 out of 5." --Rebecca @ The Book Lady's Blog, May 5, 2009
James Norman "Jim" Beaver, Jr. (born August 12, 1950) is an American stage, film, and television actor, playwright, screenwriter, and film historian. He is perhaps most familiar to worldwide audiences as the gruff but tenderhearted prospector Ellsworth on the HBO Western drama series Deadwood, a starring role which brought him acclaim and a Screen Actors Guild Awards nomination for Ensemble Acting after three decades of supporting work in films and TV. He currently portrays Bobby Singer in the CW television series Supernatural. His memoir Life's That Way was published in April 2009.
Beaver was born in Laramie, Wyoming, the son of Dorothy Adell (née Crawford) and James Norman Beaver, Sr. (1924-2004), a minister. His father was of French and English heritage (the family name was originally de Beauvoir, and Beaver is a distant cousin of author and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir and Pennsylvania governor General James A. Beaver), and his mother is Scots-German-Cherokee and a descendant of senator, governor, and three-time U.S. Attorney General John J. Crittenden. Although his parents' families had both been long in Texas, Beaver was born in Laramie while his father was doing graduate work in accounting at the University of Wyoming. Returning to Texas, Beaver Sr. worked as an accountant and as a minister for the Church of Christ in Fort Worth, Texas, Crowley, Texas, Dallas, Texas and Grapevine, Texas. For most of Jim Beaver's youth, his family lived in Irving, Texas, even while his father preached in surrounding communities. He and his three younger sisters (Denise, Renée, and Teddlie) all attended Irving High School (where he was a classmate of ZZ Top drummer Frank Beard), but he transferred in his senior year to Fort Worth Christian Academy, from which he graduated in 1968. He also took courses at Fort Worth Christian College. Despite having appeared in some elementary-school plays, he showed no particular interest in an acting career, but immersed himself in film history and expressed a desire for a career as a writer, publishing a few short stories in his high school anthology.
Less than two months after his graduation from high school, Beaver followed several of his close friends into the United States Marine Corps. Following basic training at Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego, Beaver was trained there as a microwave radio relay technician. He served at the Marine Corps Base Twentynine Palms and at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton before being transferred to the 1st Marine Division near Da Nang, South Vietnam in 1970. He served as a radio operator at an outlying detachment of the 1st Marine Regiment, then as supply chief for the division communications company. He returned to the U.S. in 1971 and was discharged as Corporal (E-4), though he remained active in the Marine Reserve until 1976.
Upon his release from active duty in 1971, he returned to Irving, Texas, and worked briefly for Frito-Lay as a corn-chip dough mixer. He entered what is now Oklahoma Christian University, where he became interested in theatre. He made his true theatrical debut in a small part in The Miracle Worker. The following year, he transferred to Central State University (now known as the University of Central Oklahoma). He performed in numerous plays in college and supported himself as a cabdriver, a movie projectionist, a tennis-club maintenance man, and an amusement-park stuntman at Frontier City. He also worked as a newscaster and hosted jazz and classical music programs on radio station KCSC. During his college days, he also began to write, completing several plays and also his first book, on actor John Garfield, while still a student. Beaver graduated with a degree in Oral Communications in 1975.[5] He briefly pursued graduate studies, but soon returned to Irving, Texas.
Jim Beaver made his professional stage debut in October 1972, while still a college student, in Rain, by W. Somerset Maugham at the Oklahoma Theatre Center in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. After returning to Texas, he did a great deal of local theatre in the Dallas area, supporting himself as a film cleaner at a 16 mm film rental firm and as a stagehand for the Dallas Ballet. He joined the Shakespeare Festival of Dallas in 1976, performing in numerous productions. In 1979, he was commissioned by Actors Theatre of Louisville to write the first of three plays for that company (Spades, Sidekick, and Semper Fi), and was twice a finalist in the theatre's national Great American Play Contest (for Once Upon a Single Bound and Verdigris). Along with plays, he continued writing for film journals and for several years was a columnist, critic, and feature writer for the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures magazine Films in Review.
Moving to New York City in 1979, Beaver worked steadily onstage in stock and on tour, simultaneously writing plays and researching a biography of actor George Reeves (a project which he still pursues between acting jobs). He appeared in starring roles in such plays as The Hasty Heart and The Rainmaker in Birmingham, Alabama and The Lark in Manchester, New Hampshire, and toured the country as Macduff in Macbeth and in The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia. During this period, he ghostwrote the book Movie Blockbusters for critic Steven Scheuer.
In 1983, he moved to Los Angeles, California to continue research on his biography of George Reeves. He worked for a year as the film archivist for the Variety Arts Center. Following a reading of his play Verdigris, he was asked to join the prestigious Theatre West company in Hollywood, where he continues as an actor and playwright to this day. Verdigris was produced to very good reviews in 1985 and Beaver was signed by the powerful Triad Artists agency. He immediately began to work writing episodes of various television series, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents (he received a 1987 CableACE Award nomination for his very first TV script, for this show), Tour of Duty, and Vietnam War Story. He also worked occasionally in small roles in films and television.
The 1988 Writers Guild of America strike fundamentally altered the freelance television writing market, and Beaver's TV writing career came to an abrupt halt. However, a chance meeting led to his being cast as the best friend of star Bruce Willis in Norman Jewison's drama about Vietnam veterans, In Country, and his acting career suddenly took up the slack where his TV writing career had faltered. (Beaver was the only actual Vietnam veteran among the principal cast of In Country.)
Subsequently he has appeared in many popular films, including Sister Act, Sliver, Bad Girls, Adaptation., Magnolia, and The Life of David Gale. He starred in the TV series Thunder Alley as the comic sidekick to Ed Asner, and as homicide cop Earl Gaddis on Reasonable Doubts. He was also French Stewart's sullen boss Happy Doug on the sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun.
In 2002, Beaver was cast as one of the stars of the ensemble Western drama Deadwood in the role of Whitney Ellsworth, a goldminer whom he often described as "Gabby Hayes with Tourette syndrome". Ellsworth went from being a filth-covered reprobate to marrying the richest woman in town and becoming a beloved and stalwart figure in the community. (Originally Ellsworth did not have a first name, but when it became necessary to provide one, Beaver requested he be named Whitney Ellsworth, after the producer of George Reeves's Adventures of Superman.) He continued his long research for the Reeves biography, and in 2005 served as the historical/biographical consultant on the theatrical feature film about Reeves's death, Hollywoodland.
Beaver in 2006 joined the cast of the HBO drama John from Cincinnati while simultaneously playing the recurring roles of Bobby Singer on Supernatural and Carter Reese on another HBO drama Big Love. He then took on the role of Sheriff Charlie Mills in the CBS drama Harper's Island, which aired from April 9, 2009 to July 11, 2009.
His memoir of the year following his wife's 2003 diagnosis of lung cancer, entitled Life's That Way, was purchased in a preemptive bid by Putnam/Penguin publishers in the fall of 2007. Prior to publication in April, 2009, it was chosen for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program for 2009.
Beaver studied acting with Clyde Ventura and Academy Award-winning actor Maximilian Schell.
During college, Beaver married a fellow student, Debbie Young, in August 1973, but the couple separated four months later (though divorce did not occur until 1976). For several years after his move to California, Beaver shared a house with character actor Hank Worden, who had been a friend since Beaver's childhood. In 1989, following a four-year courtship, Beaver married actress/casting director Cecily Adams, daughter of Get Smart star Don Adams. Their daughter Madeline was born in 2001. Cecily Adams died of lung cancer March 3, 2004.
This review is from: Life's That Way: A Memoir (Hardcover)
This book was edited from an email journal actor Jim Beaver (Deadwood, Supernatural, Harper's Island) wrote each night for a year in 2003-4 to keep family and friends informed about his wife Cecily's desperate fight against cancer, and after her loss, about how he and his very young daughter Maddie continued on with their lives. There is grief here, together with brutally raw and honest pain, anger, fear, helplessness, guilt, and despair - but there is also joy, laughter, and hope, and most of all, there is love: Jim's love for his wife and daughter, their love for him, and the amazing outpouring of love and help from family, friends, and even strangers who responded to Cecily's struggle and its impact on others.
For anyone dealing with love and loss, this book has hope to offer and lessons in life to teach, all without a word of preaching. If you've loved and lost someone - parent, spouse, child, friend, lover - you've felt what's in this book, and reading it might help bring you healing, if only by letting you know that you are not alone in what and how you feel and by giving you the means and words to talk about it. I'm watching my mother being stolen by Alzheimer's, and this book speaks to me even in the midst of ongoing loss. Read it, and take comfort.
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This review is from: Life's That Way: A Memoir (Hardcover)
A sweet, heartbreaking, inspiring, and yes funny, slice of life is recorded in the emails of Jim Beaver's Life's That Way. Early in the book, I realized that my preconceptions of the title and the subject were in error. Life's That Way isn't the passive equivalent of "life is like that" and there is nothing we can do. Life's That Way is pointing in a direction and making a conscious decision to not give up, to be anything but passive, and to run or walk and sometimes crawl toward Life again.
For anyone that has experienced an intimate loss, which is most of us, this will be an emotional reading. But the reward is Jim's honesty and bravery in reporting his feelings, feelings that sometimes as survivors we don't even want to admit having, but ultimately connect us through being human. The book is a lovely tribute to the tenacity of spirit of Cecily, Jim, and their daughter Madeline Rose.
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I thought this book would be sad,but i wasn't expecting the moving love story. It was the most beautifully written,love letter to his dear Pie. It was sad,but uplifting in that no matter how much we grief we still LOVE. It was a true tribute not only to her,but to their love.I know through this book his daughter will gain the greatest insight into what a beautiful woman his dear Pie really was.
It was also very heartfelt in how he dealt with not only the cancer but in being a single parent. I know any parent reading this book will understand the great love and fear he had for his daughter and in his ability to be the parent she deserved.
This book should be in everyone's home!
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