God Said, “Ha!”

In 1995, after an amicable divorce, Julia Sweeney bought a bungalow in Hollywood, settling in with her three cats to begin an independent life of blissful solitude and personal growth. But then, God said, “Ha!” One month after her move to Los Angeles, Julia’s younger brother Michael was diagnosed with terminal lymph cancer. Julia’s new home became Michael’s and then transformed into the Sweeney family center, as their parents moved from Spokane and siblings and relatives began descending for visits. Julia coped by sharing the daily travails of the Sweeney family in poignant and hilarious detail at the Un-Cabaret in West Hollywood – from the minor disasters of everyday life, to the adjustments of living in close quarters with the people she’d spent half a lifetime growing up and away from, to the terrors and heartaches life-threatening illness brings. Then when it seemed things couldn’t get worse, they did. Just weeks before Mike died, Julia was diagnosed with a rare form of cervical cancer – her “sympathy cancer”, as Mike called it – bonding them in a giddily black-humored club of two: the “International House of Cancer”. Within days of burying her brother, Julia underwent a radical hysterectomy and began her solo journey through this house she’d never expected to move into, a house she had until now seen only from the outside looking in.