Chasing Cosby: The Downfall of America’s Dad
Excerpted from Chasing Cosby: The Downfall of America’s Dad by Nicole Weisensee Egan. Copyright © 2019. Available from Seal Press, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Like millions of other Americans who helped make the comedy one of the most popular shows in the history of television, I became a fan of The Cosby Show when it first aired in the 1980s.
It debuted my senior year of high school, the same year my older brother died, and watching the show gave me an escape out of my own, fraught home and into the cozy normalcy of a family not traumatized by death. For me the Huxtables were a thirty-minute visit to a warm and stable world, where the kids would borrow each other’s clothes without permission and sneak out to concerts, all while the parents lovingly guided them with witty life lessons.
My own mother was nearly paralyzed with grief over the loss of her only son, and my father had all he could do to hold her together while juggling the demands of a job that took him out of town two or three nights a week. The Cosby Show was steady. The Cosby Show made me feel safe. CLICK FOR MORE
