Help Me Make it Through the Night: Elvis saves the bedwetters

Today's Guardian newspaper contains an excerpt from American writer and comedian Sarah Silverman's memoir, The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee, published by Faber & Faber. The book describes the trials and tribulations of a teenage (and pre-teen) bedwetter.

Writes Silverman:

On 16 August, 1977, Elvis Presley saved my life.

Poor Sarah, surprised into a sleepver at a friend's house, wakes up in her own customary warmth, but this time in her friend Heather's "way-too-sexy-for-a-six-year-old pyjamas" and sleeping bag.

I do the only thing a terrified zombie can do: I pretend it didn't happen. I get up with the other girls, take off my PJs like the other girls, and change into my clothes. They're so lucky to be able to move through life so effortlessly. I know at six how lucky they are – they probably still don't know.

Mrs Peters walks into the room, and before she can say anything, steps right on to the pile of my sexy urine-soaked pyjamas. My heart stops as I watch her face burn red like a Disney villainess.

"Who did this!?!?!" she screams, with a look of pure fury. I stand there, quietly enduring the world's youngest heart attack, wishing for my fear to somehow transport me. Am I supposed to answer? Is the onus on six-year-old me to fill this silence? And that's when it happens – Mr Peters comes in and grabs his wife, "Elvis Presley died!!!"

The news of the King's death overtook Mrs Peters, and I was spared. Somehow I got home without the other kids knowing what had happened.

In the same Guardian supplement, Enrique Iglesias invites Barack Obama, Michael Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and Elvis to his dream dinner party. Peach ice cream is hard to come by so I hope he's not intent on serving it.

Help Me Make it Through the Night here.