Based on a True Story: A Memoir

Structured as a pseudo-memoir but composed almost entirely of invented events, the book follows a fictionalized version of comedian Norm Macdonald through an absurdist, darkly comic narrative that blends loosely autobiographical career milestones with outrageous fabrications. The result is a comic novel wearing the mask of a celebrity tell-all.

The story opened with Norm in an Edmonton hotel room, surrounded by empty minibar bottles, lying beside a woman he did not remember. His agent called to tell him someone had edited his Wikipedia page to declare him dead of a morphine overdose in that very room. Norm read the entry and realized the only inaccuracy was the tense: Changing "is" to "was" captured his life uncomfortably well. He resolved to write his own account, titling it Based on a True Story because memory was unreliable and no story could be fully true.

The narrative jumped to Norm's job interview with Lorne Michaels, the creator and producer of Saturday Night Live (SNL), at 30 Rockefeller Center. When Lorne asked him to audition with two original characters, Norm panicked and pulled morphine and syrettes, small syringe-like tubes for injection, from his pocket, calling the bit a character named "The Connection." Lorne dryly informed him this was not a character but a "recurring character," and Norm was hired.

In the present day, Norm sat alone at The World Famous Comedy Store, a Los Angeles comedy club, bombing onstage. A sudden plan crystallized during his failed set. He forced Adam Eget, the club's manager, to abandon his job and drive through the night to Las Vegas, invoking an old debt Adam Eget owed him from a night on the Atlantic City boardwalk.

On the drive, Norm narrated his childhood on a hardscrabble farm in the Ottawa Valley, where he grew up with his parents, brothers, and Old Jack, a hired hand who worked only for room and board. Old Jack was a magician, a former wartime sniper who refused to hunt, and the best man Norm had ever known. At age six, Norm watched his cat kill a mouse for sport and learned that things were not always what they appeared. At eight, a darkly suggestive sequence unfolded when Old Jack lured Norm into his toolshed. Once inside, Old Jack's eyes "flashed black like the wing of a crow," and he bolted the door. Norm stated, "I forget what happened next." The following chapter, covering ages eight to thirteen, consisted of a single word: "forget." When memory resumed, Old Jack had died, and at the funeral, Norm's terror dissolved when he saw the body was not Old Jack but something that merely resembled him.

At Whiskey Pete's, a small casino on the California-Nevada border, Norm revealed his two-part plan. Plan A: He had over a million dollars in casino credit, built from years of losing and reliably paying his debts, and would bet on sports until he won a million in profit, then buy a ranch in Montana. Plan B: If he lost everything, he would inject a lethal dose of Dilaudid, a powerful opioid, and die. If Norm won, Adam Eget would become head ranch hand. If Norm died, Adam Eget would find the body and have a ghostwriter produce a posthumous book.

Throughout the narrative, interludes appeared from Terence Keane, the ghostwriter assigned to the memoir. Keane revealed that his birth name was Charles Manson. In the 1960s he published a celebrated book about the Beat writers, but days after publication, the other Charles Manson was charged with the Tate-LaBianca murders. Keane's book was pulled from stores and burned. He changed his name and became a ghostwriter. Keane despised Norm but needed the fee, and his labor slowly consumed his own identity.

Interspersed with the Vegas storyline, Norm recounted his comedy career in wildly embellished fashion. He lost on International Star Search and missed his chance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson by mistaking the real talent booker for a con man. At SNL, he fell in love with fellow cast member Sarah Silverman, who was dating writer Dave Attell. Norm enlisted Colin Quinn, another cast member, to help hire a hit man to murder Attell, was arrested in a sting, and served four months in prison, which he misheard as forty years. He struck a deal with the Devil to win Sarah's love, but the deal failed. He obtained the anchor desk of Weekend Update, the show's mock-news segment, by bribing Lorne with morphine and bluffing that he could make Al Franken, an SNL writer also vying for the position, a senator. He assembled a writing team whose "punk" approach stripped jokes of cleverness and innuendo. His tenure ended when Don Ohlmeyer, the head of NBC entertainment and a friend of O. J. Simpson, fired Norm for stopping his O.J. jokes after Simpson's acquittal.

In Vegas, Norm's plan unraveled. After an initial winning streak, he followed a stranger's massive bet on an underdog boxer, only to discover the stranger was "Longshot Louie," a wealthy eccentric. Norm lost $360,000, spiraled, blacked out for a month, and exhausted his casino credit. He reflected that gambling was driven not by winning but by the moment when the dice were in the air: "Hope is a wonderful thing to be addicted to." He injected a lethal dose of Dilaudid and felt his consciousness drift away, but did not die. Stumbling outside, he hallucinated God's face above the Luxor pyramid. God tried to dictate a message for humanity, but Norm, impaired, could not transcribe the words.

A parallel storyline involved a terminally ill nine-year-old boy whose true wish was not to visit SNL but to kill a baby seal. Norm took the boy to Newfoundland, where the child swung a hakapik, a club used in seal hunting, killed the seal, and made a miraculous recovery, only to die a year later after being struck by a bus.

Desperate, Norm borrowed a million dollars from the fat man with the artificial hair, a sinister loan shark who lived in a mansion overlooking the Salton Sea, a salt-corroded wasteland in Southern California. The loan required a signed life insurance policy naming the fat man as beneficiary. Norm and Adam Eget drove east to Atlantic City. On the road, Norm briefly felt his gambling fever break, but the compulsion returned. Near Atlantic City, the car crashed on ice. Norm had a near-death experience in which deceased loved ones revealed themselves as damned souls and attacked him; Adam Eget revived him with CPR.

In Atlantic City, Adam Eget won a $2.6 million video-keno jackpot using Norm's nickel, but Sammi, Adam Eget's girlfriend, stole the winning ticket and disappeared. The fat man called to demand payment, and Adam Eget proposed the only solution: Finish the book and collect the advance.

They barricaded themselves in Keane's New York brownstone, where Norm dictated under guard. Keane, whose own novel had been rejected by every publisher, attempted suicide. Norm caught him on a stepladder with a noose, misidentified the attempt as autoerotic asphyxiation, and talked him down. Eventually Keane injected morphine, took a gun, donned Norm's misspelled jacket, and escaped. In a bar, dressed as Norm, Keane wrote "the final chapter" on the back of a menu, reflecting that Norm's post-SNL life had been "a full sprint, trying with all my might to outrun the wolves of irrelevancy." The chapter concluded: "I've been lucky."

The storylines converged on a New York street. A gunshot from an unseen assailant struck Keane. Norm saw the fat man getting into his red Cadillac as it drove away. Keane died on the sidewalk, smelling pizza, thinking, "Life is so good." A singing telegram arrived at the brownstone announcing that Keane's novel had been purchased by a publisher, too late for Keane to know. The final section, written by Norm in unpunctuated stream-of-consciousness prose, ended with him at a bar leveraging his fading fame for free chili, only to learn the restaurant could offer only turkey chili. "Story of my life."