“Karen: A Brother Remembers” by Kelsey Grammer

c.2025, Harper Select $31.99 456 pages

You can’t seem to hold a thought in your head.

Any memory leads to something else, leads to another thing and for a minute, you can forget that you lost a loved one. Then everything rushes back, it hits you like a linebacker, and that original thought vanishes somewhere in the pain. People who know grief, know, as does actor Kelsey Grammer and in his new memoir, “Karen,” he shares her story.

She was supposed to come to Florida to celebrate her birthday.

Six hours before Karen Grammer disappeared, her big brother Kelsey talked to her eagerly about her plans.

She seemed to like living in Colorado; he’d been ousted from Juilliard and was searching for acting jobs in New York.

It’d been too far, too long.

He hung up his phone after saying goodbye, not knowing that it would be the last time.

Karen, he says, had dropped by her workplace on that summer evening in 1975, when three men came in and snatched her, took her to an apartment, then raped and tortured her before stabbing her multiple times, killing her. When she didn’t come home that night, her roommate called Grammer, which didn’t prepare him for the worst because who could fully steel oneself for the murder of a nineteen- year-old?

After the funeral, Grammer tried immediately to put himself back together. He landed his first acting job but there were times when he might stay in bed all day and memories flooded his head so much that he sometimes couldn’t think right. Long rides on his motorcycle didn’t help. Surfing was no comfort. One day, when his girlfriend was away, he watched a “run-ofthe- mill tearjerker movie that was the perfect film to turn me inside out.”

He began to sob, but healing would be a long time coming… There are two ways of looking at “Karen.”

Author Kelsey Grammer offers a very good portrait of grieving and remembering, and the emotions he shares may be comforting to readers who’ve lost a loved one to crime and have endured the maelstrom that exists alongside loss.

And his book is very chaotic.

Reading it is like wringing thoughts onto a page, swirling them with your finger, placing the page on an oldschool turntable, and watching it spin for a very long time. Random thoughts seem to come and go back and forth and nowhere, or they reoccur with little cohesiveness, they repeat to the point of eye-rolling, or appear and make you squint in that “Huh?” way you do. There’s a lot of filler here, too many not-quite-gluedtogether memories that scatter like blown dandelion seeds, and an exhaustingly long lot of names of people that will mean basically nothing to the vast majority of readers.

More editing would have gone a long way toward making this a better book. As it is, though, its audience is narrowed and that’s too bad. There are nuggets inside “Karen” that are worth reading and knowing but if you want a linear, slick, makessense- all-the-time book, hold that thought.

BOOKWORM SEZ

By Terri Schlichenmeyer