If I Don't Laugh, I'll Cry

How Death, Debt, and Comedy Led to a Life of Faith, Farming, and Forgetting What I Came into This Room For

By: Molly Stillman, Kristin Hannah - foreword

Narrated by: Molly Stillman, Lisa Larsen

Length: 8 hrs and 4 mins

Publisher's summary

Read by the author.

Some people have life all figured out. This book is for the rest of us.

Molly Stillman has lived the type of life that when shared, people stop in their tracks and ask “Wait, what happened?” Molly’s mother, Lynda Van Devanter Buckley, served as an Army nurse during the Vietnam War and wrote the bestselling memoir Home Before Morning. When Molly was seventeen, Lynda passed away after an eight-year battle with an autoimmune disorder due to her exposure to Agent Orange. Four years later Molly turned twenty-one and unexpectedly inherited a quarter of a million dollars from her mother’s estranged family’s estate. Through “retail therapy” and a long series of grossly irresponsible financial decisions, Molly found herself broke with over $36,000 in credit card debt less than two years later. Shame, guilt, and embarrassment set in.

With aspirations of a career in comedy, Molly used humor to mask the pain and brokenness she felt, believing that if she looked joyful and put together on the outside, it would eventually be true on the inside. Instead, she spent the next few years depressed, lonely, and feeling alienated from those closest to her. But an unlikely call with a compassionate credit counselor, meeting the spreadsheet-loving man who eventually became her husband, and a surprising visit to a church started her on a path that changed everything.

If I Don’t Laugh, I’ll Cry offers humor and hope to all of us who have struggled to reconcile the life we are living with the life we thought we wanted to have. Molly will bring you into the tension of feeling both joy and grief and show you that every broken, messed up story has a purpose, and it’s possible to gain everything if you’re willing to surrender it all to Jesus.

©2024 Molly Stillman (P)2024 Thomas Nelson

Funny, raw and real

How brave to show so much of your life, the dark parts most of us hide and are scared for the light to hit. Thank you. It was funny and raw and I loved every word. What a blessing it was to hear it spoken by Molly herself. Feels like that long catch up with a friend you haven’t seen in decades. A story of faith, encouragement, grief, childhood. I loved it, thank you for sharing your story with us.