The comedian's new memoir, Joyful Recollections of Trauma, details the childhood abuse he suffered at the hands of his stepfather. He tells Q’s Tom Power why he still struggles to talk about it. , Paul Scheer once shared a story about his grandmother telling him not to open the door to strangers because there was a rogue butcher in the neighbourhood who chopped up children.
"Me and my wife knew it, but my best friend didn't know this story because I just don't talk about it," Scheer tells, Scheer held back the details, but his agent kept pushing him to go deeper with the material. For years, Scheer carried the impact of his stepfather's abuse. He bullied kids at school and fought them in the same ways that he experienced at home. When he finally realized that fighting wasn't a "badge of honour," he stopped the violence. But the trauma came up in a new way: passivity."I'm not going to get into a fight because I don't want to be the problem," Scheer remembers thinking at that time.