Wann wird es endlich wieder so, wie es nie war

This second part of Meyerhoff’s autobiographical journey feels like a book that knows exactly how to entertain you, and is slightly less certain how much it wants to comfort you. It is, on the surface, an almost disarming premise: a childhood spent on the grounds of a psychiatric hospital, surrounded by rituals, ruptures, and characters who are never merely background. Meyerhoff leans into the comedy of it, and he is very good at comedy. The episodes arrive with the loose confidence of someone who trusts that the world, if described precisely enough, will generate its own punchlines. Some of the funniest moments are funny because they are told without strain. The story about the allegedly dead body that turns out not to be dead is a perfect example: the kind of childhood adventure that should not work as an anecdote, and yet it does, because Meyerhoff stages it with the right mixture of naivety, panic, and retrospective clarity. The hospital setting becomes a playground for the absurd, and for a while you might think the book’s main gift is its ability to make the abnormal feel weirdly ordinary. But the stronger current is the family story, and especially the hard father son relationship that keeps tightening and loosening like a knot you cannot quite undo. Here the humor starts to function differently. It stops being a destination and becomes a method: a way of approaching a subject that would otherwise be too raw, too close to the skin. Tragedy does not enter with drama. It is already present, just waiting around the corner of the next laugh. One scene stayed with me more than any set piece: the quiet, almost contractual exchange of limits, the line that says there are things you do not know about me, and there are things I do not know about you, and this is good as it is. It lands with the calm force of recognition. Not a reconciliation, not even necessarily an understanding, but a form of coexistence that many families practice without naming it. Meyerhoff’s strength is that he can give such moments room without turning them into lessons, and without diluting them with sentimentality. He is not, and does not try to be, a page turner. The book moves at the pace of recollection, not suspense. The pleasure is in the voice, in the cadence, in the way a paragraph can hold both mischief and ache. Even if this volume is not quite as strong as parts 1 and 3, it remains deeply readable and often genuinely amusing, with emotional afterimages that linger longer than the jokes. Verdict: 4.5 stars. A slightly uneven but rewarding middle volume, funniest when it is offhand, strongest when it admits what family life withholds. Best for readers who enjoy memoir as crafted storytelling, and who appreciate laughter that keeps its shadow.