I'd Rather Laugh: How to Be Happy Even When Life Has Other Plans for You

Yes, there's a real woman behind Mike Myers's ""Coffee Talk"" caricature Linda Richman--his mother-in-law, now a lecturer at the Canyon Ranch spa. And has she got some stories! There's one about her nutcase mother. who refused to tell eight-year-old Linda that her father had died, instead claiming he had just ""gone away,"" and another about Richman's marriage to a compulsive gambler. She also tells of the agoraphobia that kept her in her apartment for 11 years, and of the accidental death of her beloved 29-year-old son. The point of Richman's earthy, funny and sensible book is that she transcended these traumas--though not without a little wackiness, such as her one-time habit of shocking total strangers by telling them that her son has died. Amid her anecdotes about a foray into multispiritualism (aka ""Lindaism""), her technique for eliciting group sob stories at Canyon Ranch (put on Groucho masks) and recommendations of tearjerkers like Terms of Endearment (""the nuclear weapon of dead children cinema""), she offers some good, if hardly original, advice. Among her nuggets: go see a therapist; when it comes to relatives who can't provide sanity and support, try to ""accept whatever good is there and ignore the rest""; pain doesn't go away, but it can dim with time; once you give a gift or give help, accept that you have no say in how it's used. Agent, Richard Pine. (Feb.) Forecast: If Richman is as endearingly entertaining in person as this book and her over-the-top son-in-law, Mike Myers, suggest, her three-city author tour and 25-city TV satellite tour should propel hearty sales. Simultaneous Time Warner audio.