A Mad Magazine Humorist Goes Home to Bury His Father, and Finds Himself

What happens when the life you built stops making sense?

Garth Gerhart found out the hard way, and the funny way, and the painfully honest way. When he got word that his estranged father had died, he boarded a plane to Montana carrying much more than a suitcase. He carried decades of silence, regret, and questions that would now never be answered. What started as an obligation to bury the past turned into an unflinching confrontation with it.

Montana Made is Gerhart's memoir of that journey, and of the larger unraveling it came in the middle of. It's brutally funny and achingly honest, a book about what it means to come undone in the middle of life, and about the small mercies that can still bring you home.

Gerhart's humor is no accident. He is a humorist whose writing and illustrations have appeared in Mad Magazine, the legendary satire magazine that shaped generations of American comedy. Since the 1950s, Mad has taught readers to poke fun at everything, from politics and advertising to movies and the absurdities of everyday life. That sensibility runs all through Montana Made. Gerhart finds the ridiculous in awkward family reunions, in therapy sessions, and in his own anxious brain, and his jokes land even in the darkest moments.

But the humor never hides the pain. Gerhart writes candidly about grief, depression, and the fragile rules we cling to just to keep going. The trip to Montana becomes a reckoning, not just with his father, but with who he has become. Along winding highways and in late-night breakdowns, he discovers that healing rarely looks heroic. Sometimes it looks like failure. Sometimes it looks like laughter. Sometimes it looks like finally daring to turn around and face where you came from.

That honesty is one of the book's most valuable qualities, especially for men. Depression often shows up differently than people expect. It can look less like sadness and more like irritability, exhaustion, numbness, or withdrawal, and many men struggle quietly for years without recognizing it or asking for help. Hearing a funny, relatable guy talk openly about therapy and breakdowns does something important: it makes those experiences feel normal and survivable. Gerhart never lectures. He simply tells the truth, and in doing so he gives readers permission to tell theirs.

Grieving an estranged parent is its own particular kind of complicated, too. There's the loss of the person, but also the loss of the possibility that things might someday have been different. There may be anger mixed with sadness, relief mixed with guilt. Gerhart explores that tangle with nuance and generosity, accepting that some understanding may always remain incomplete. Anyone who has lost a parent they had a difficult relationship with will find something deeply familiar in these pages.

And then there's Montana itself, with its big skies and long roads, a landscape that seems to demand reflection. The setting gives the memoir a sense of space and journey, the feeling of a man driving back through his own history one mile at a time.

Montana Made is for anyone who has ever wondered how to keep living when the life they built no longer makes sense. It's for readers who love memoirs with humor and heart, for anyone navigating grief or midlife upheaval, and for fans of writers who can make you laugh out loud and then, a page later, make you feel completely understood.

Montana Made by Garth Gerhart is available now in paperback and hardcover.