Even Chelsea Handler Has A Price

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On this episode of Life Will Be the Death of Me, Chelsea Handler is joined by her friend Sean Hayes, star of Will and Grace, to talk about her book by the same name. Sean says again that he and Chelsea are very similar: the youngest in a big family, with early abandonments causing trust problems. In Chelsea’s case, it was the death of her older brother Chet when she was nine; in Sean’s, it was his father leaving the family when he was five. “I watched him drive away. I was like... I didn't know what to do with that. I was five years old,” Sean says. “But I remember it so vividly. And then, it sticks with you forever and then you don't trust people, and then... you test people for the rest of your life. Like, I'm going to test you to see if you'll stick around and I can trust you.” Chelsea agrees: “And if I can trust you, I’ll find a reason not to...and then you’ll be out anyway.” 

They both felt that those upheavals caused them to be a little stuck at those respective ages. As an example, Chelsea talks about a prank she pulled on an old boyfriend who was having some stomach problems one day while they were hanging out poolside, and he asked her to accompany him back to their hotel room. It annoyed her: “I'm sitting on the bed thinking about how ridiculous it is that a man expects us to just sit around while they s**t themselves in the next room. I was like, this is so disrespectful. [Do] I have no value, that I have to listen to this squirt s**t over there?” That’s when she saw the leftover chocolate cake from the night before. With some strategic smearing, she was able to convince him that he had unknowingly defecated in the bed overnight. “He's rolling up the sheets and he's like, we've got to go. We've got to check out. We're going to just take the sheets and put them in the trunk,” Chelsea recalls. She finally gave up the game because she couldn’t stop laughing. The prank illustrates that she was stuck in adolescence a bit: "I didn't think because my brother died when I was nine years old that I became this person. But...that is the blueprint for you, as an adult. You stop growing at that age, when you are that small."

But while their families were dysfunctional and their childhoods chaotic, they both came to terms with their parents as adults. Growing up, Chelsea says she hated her father, that they would fight all the time. After she moved to L.A. to pursue her career, she returned to visit them. “[My dad] took out a cheap bottle of vodka and a paper bag... He goes, ‘Sweetie, if we knew this whole time all you needed was a little vodka, we would have given you to you when you were six,’” Chelsea laughs. “In that ridiculous moment, I'm like, they finally hear me and see me and pay attention to me.”

They also find a lot of similarities in how they dealt with their parents passing away. “There are two deaths with Alzheimer’s,” Sean says of his mother’s illness and death. “There's the death of the person and the death of the actual body. And so, I was mourning my mom dying all the time. And then, once you get over that, you realize you're caring for this person who you still love but isn't necessarily still the same person you knew. You start to find the humor and you start to laugh.” Chelsea felt the same way. “In those moments, that's all you have to hold on to because if you're not laughing, you're dying too. You just want...some relief from the pain and from the exhaustion,” she says. 

Join Sean and Chelsea as they discuss their complicated family relationships, Chelsea’s Chow-Chows, and how everyone has a price (“I really believe if someone said, hey, here's $50 million...Can you b**w me? I'd be like, I can't,” Chelsea says, to which Sean replies, “No. You could. Yeah. Is the answer. Anybody could. $50 million? Yeah.”) on this episode of Life Will Be The Death Of Me. 

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