Alison Larking Brings GRIEF...A COMEDY to Edinburgh Fringe

Esteemed English American actor, comedian, bestselling author and podcaster Alison Larkin returns to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for the first time in 24 years. Her new theatre show, 'Grief...A Comedy', will be at the Assembly Rooms George Square Studio 2 for the month of August.

'Grief...A Comedy,' an 'improbably funny, life-affirming' hour about love, loss and hope previewed at the Soho Theatre in London last November, with a second performance added by popular demand. The production is accompanied with music by Emmy award winning composer Gary Schreiner. Advance copies of her brand-new book of the same name will be available for purchase after the show exclusively for audience members.

Alison found true love for the first time in her 50s with an Indian climate scientist who had also immigrated to the US. Then, a week after they decided to marry, he died, and something wildly unexpected happened. Instead of wanting to hide under the bed and never come out, Alison found herself wanting to live and love more fully than ever before. When Archbishop Desmond Tutu found out about it, he insisted she write this show. So, if you don't like it, you can blame him.

Larkin was born in the US, adopted by British parents and raised in England and Africa. By the time she was 24 and living in London, whenever she went on a date with a guy, she'd find herself on red alert, waiting for the object of her affections to leave her. They never did. She left them, before they could even think about it. "The key to dealing with a fear of abandonment is to date people you don't like, so if they do leave you, it doesn't matter."

Alison began to wonder if her mistrust of love had something to do with the fact that she was adopted. Maybe if she found out that it wasn't so much that her birth mother didn't want to keep her but that she simply could not - maybe that would free her up to live and love like normal people.

Alison looked for and found her long lost birth mother... in Bald Mountain Tennessee.

Did the reunion instantly solve her problems in the love department? No. The first thing Alison's birth mother said to her was "Did you know you had a twin? No? Well you did. Only he died in childbirth." Early childhood abandonment AND twin loss? Love would be something other people did. So Alison gave up on love altogether, moved to New York and became a stand-up comic. Then she met an older man and married him. Alison's stand-up act evolved into her hit one woman show about her reunion with her birth mother. It led to Jim Henson Productions and ABC TV flying Alison to Hollywood to develop a sitcom for her to star in.

Alison's two children were born in Los Angeles, but she didn't want to raise them in the celebrity culture: so she quit Hollywood and moved to New Jersey. Then, when her kids were 7 and 9, Alison found out her husband had lost all her money. At 43 she left New Jersey and her husband and moved with her two young children into voluntary rural exile in the hills of Western Massachusetts, where she still resides.

Audible tracked her down and said that if she would promise to narrate 15 audiobooks a year for them, they'd set her up with a home recording studio so she could earn a living as a single mother living in the middle of the countryside. Alison began a new career narrating books for a living. Homesick for England, she set up her own audiobook company and started narrating the English Classics. Flip forward ten years and Alison is now an A-list audiobook narrator with a successful audiobook company, Alison Larkin Presents.

Elizabeth has Darcy, Jane Eyre has Rochester, but Alison is lonely as hell, she's put on 20 pounds, her kids are in college and she's almost 52 years old. Realizing she will never know what it's like to find true love, she decides to do something about it before it's too late. She tries on-line dating and is about to give up on love forever when, quite unexpectedly, she meets an extraordinary man...

Alison is an internationally acclaimed writer, comedian, speaker, actress, producer and the award-winning narrator of over 280 audiobooks, including The Complete Novels of Jane Austen, currently the top selling Austen audiobook in the world. Her bestselling autobiographical novel, The English American, sprang from her hit one woman show of the same name, about an adopted English woman who finds her birth mother - and her 'self' - in the United States. With an authentic adopted heroine at its centre, Larkin's compulsively readable first novel unearths universal truths about love, identity, and family with wit, warmth, and heart.

As a comedian she headlined at The Comic Strip in New York and The Comedy Store in Los Angeles and spent three years under Hollywood studio contract with CBS, Jim Henson Productions and ABC to star in her own sitcom. As an actress she has appeared on and off Broadway with the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her unusually wide range of voices can be heard in countless movies, games and cartoons from the Grand Theft Auto 5, to the movie Fargo to hit cartoons like The Wonderpets. The Jane Austen Podcast with Alison Larkin from Realm.FM was a Sunday Times Pick of the Week. Her brand-new podcast is called Love and Laughter after 50 with Alison Larkin.

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