Susan Isaacs

Comedian Susan Isaacs Takes God to Couples Counseling in New Memoir Angry Conversations with God

(Nashville, TN) - Jobless, loveless and living over a garage at age 40, actor-writer-Lutheran Susan Isaacs hit spiritual bottom. Her rocky relationship with God needed professional help, so she took Him to couples counseling. She chronicles her “middle class white girl’s dark night of the soul” in Angry Conversations with God: A Snarky but Authentic Spiritual Memoir (FaithWords, $19.99, March 12, 2009). Originally staged as a solo show in New York and Los Angeles, it’s a cheeky account that even at its rawest is a heartfelt affirmation of faith.

An alumnus of the acclaimed Groundlings comedy troupe who has appeared in movies such as Planes, Trains, and Automobiles and TV shows such as Seinfeld, The Drew Carey Show, and My Name is Earl, Susan cast herself as a neglected wife who confronts the ridiculous expectations she has for her spouse. Only after divorcing her perceptions of “drill sergeant Father, wimpy Jesus and drive-by Holy Spirit” does she move on to a mature faith.

Susan’s Lutheran childhood infused her with a love of God, but her church experiences were detrimental to her spiritual health. In high school, the people who represented God were threatened by her burgeoning gift for comedy: “They acted like Woody Allen, Monty Python, and John Lennon led to sex, drugs, and atheism.” The pull between art and faith continued into adulthood, with Susan feeling “too wild for the church, too tame for the world.”

In hilarious, poignant detail, she recounts her flailing attempts to find peace. Struggling with her career, an eating disorder, alcoholism, and relationships complicated by her desire to remain chaste until marriage, Susan tried everything: Pentecostals, Presbyterians, Rock-n- Roll Slackers 4 Jesus, Actors for Yahweh, and any support group on offer, including one “to heal gays of their gaiety”— though she’s not gay.

“Through that insanity, even if pastors hurt me or friends let me down or entire denominations went Shiite on my ass, I still believed God was good,” she says. “I just needed to find out where he went.”

An encounter with controlling, abusive people and strange practices drove her away from church: “I had been violated by the people of God,” Susan writes. “Maybe I had Stockholm Syndrome. I’d been held hostage by wimpy Lutherans, parroting Pentecostals, fascist counselors, and rock-n-roll slackers. I blew off friendship and love; I turned down movies and abandoned a career-making comedy troupe. For what? To honor God with wild animal noises, gold teeth and Roidheads?”

At her lowest—a period that included breaking up with her almost-fiancé, her father’s death, her mother’s stroke, and her once-promising career on life-support—Susan’s faith unraveled. Who was this God who’d called her into a relationship? Had he ever had a plan for her life? Or had she imagined all of it? Did he care anymore? Had he ever? Counseling—getting God into a room with a third party—helped her rethink her beliefs and expectations, and return to what she once knew: “that God was good and that Jesus loved me.”

Now, whenever Susan tells her “God story” in her writing and performances, she finds that “regardless of their religious beliefs, people are looking for the same things: a connection to God, a desire for meaning and a way to stay alive even when dreams die.”

That “dark night” sparked a turning point for Susan: “God torched my life and it’s the best thing that ever happened to me. But I don’t like to say that too often. You know, in case he gets any snarky ideas.”

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Susan E. Isaacs is a writer and performer with credits in TV, film, stage, and radio. She has an MFA in screenwriting from the of Southern California and is an alumnus of the Groundlings Sunday Company.

Susan has read her essays on public radio’s Weekend America and is a contributing writer to Donald Miller’s Burnside Writers Collective. She wrote DirecTV’s Songs of Praise specials, hosted by NASCAR champ Darrell Waltrip, featuring singers Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith.

She has performed her original material at the Comedy Central Stage and the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. She teaches screenwriting for the Act One Program in Hollywood. She has appeared in films such as Planes, Trains, and Automobiles and Scrooged and on TV shows such as Seinfeld, The Drew Carey Show, My Name is Earl, and many others.

Despite all those accomplishments, Susan managed to screw up every lucky break she ever had, and by age forty was jobless, loveless and living over a garage. The gory details are the basis for her new book, Angry Conversations with God. It all worked out in the end: Susan is now happily married to writer Larry W.