Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, daughter of the groundbreaking comedian Richard Pryor, has detailed a complex and often tumultuous relationship with her father in her new memoir, "Something We Said." The book explores Pryor's struggles with addiction, infidelity, and the profound impact these issues had on his family, including Stordeur Pryor's own childhood and her father's final years.
Stordeur Pryor recounts not meeting her father until she was six years old, a period marked by his burgeoning fame and increasing substance abuse. She describes a household often dominated by drugs and alcohol, with her father frequently intoxicated and surrounded by cocaine. His erratic behavior extended to violent episodes, including shooting at his then-wife's car and an incident where he set himself on fire while freebasing cocaine, sustaining burns over more than 50 percent of his body.
"He couldn’t stop messing up," Stordeur Pryor writes of her father. "He always had a glass of Courvoisier in his hand and mounds of cocaine all around the house."
The memoir also delves into a deeply painful incident involving a racial slur. Stordeur Pryor recounts a bitter fight with her mother, Maxine, during which her mother allegedly called her the "n-word." When Stordeur Pryor told her father about this exchange, he reportedly never spoke to her mother again, creating a lasting rift that her daughter has struggled to reconcile.
Richard Pryor's health declined significantly after his diagnosis with multiple sclerosis in 1986. Stordeur Pryor describes his final years as a period of profound dependency, with limited access to his children allegedly imposed by caregivers.
"He could no longer walk or use his hands, he could barely see, he was in and out of hospitals, and he needed around-the-clock care," she writes. "He couldn’t even speak anymore, except for a few sputtered words that took excruciating effort to get out."
Following Pryor's death in 2005, Stordeur Pryor found his funeral to be a "cold and sterile and monstrously hollow" experience, describing it as "a travesty of a mockery of a sham." She expressed surprise at the predominantly white attendees and the celebrant's awkward attempt at Black humor.
Adding to the post-mortem turmoil, Stordeur Pryor states she was largely cut out of her father's will, an outcome she believes he would not have wanted. "I knew in my heart that was not what he wanted," she said, recalling her legal battles to contest the will, which she ultimately lost.
Her inheritance, she found, came not from the will but from a briefcase her mother gave her on the day of the funeral, containing notebooks, letters, and unfinished jokes. Examining these personal effects over 15 years, Stordeur Pryor felt she finally came to understand her father, describing the contents as "the last breadcrumb leading me back to my father."