Can we talk?
Yes we can, because Melissa Rivers is sharing some of her late mother—Joan Rivers'—funniest stories...even though none of them are true.
The TV host stopped by E! News' Daily Pop to chat about her mother's legacy and the tall tales she told, all featured in her new book, Lies My Mother Told Me: Tall Tales From a Short Woman.
"What I did was take very typical topics—Thanksgiving, going to theater—and went as far as I could thinking, ‘What would be the craziest story my mother could make up?'" Melissa told hosts Nina Parker and Daisy Fuentes in an exclusive interview on April 18. While the book does share partial truths about her mother's life story, the truth only goes so far.
"People kept saying, ‘Are there things that are true in the book?' And I'm like, ‘Well, we had Thanksgiving,'" she joked. "[Joan] never said that ‘the Pilgrims were really bad guests for two reasons: they moved the place cards—and no hostess likes that when you've made a good seating chart—and they came dressed up, so clearly they were going somewhere else after.'"
From her mother "meeting" the Pope at the theater "by asking him to take off his hat because he was blocking her view," to her (fictitious) "brother," Melvin, the book's comical lies are exactly what fans would expect from a book about the former Fashion Police host—who died in September 2014—something that brought Melissa lots of laughs while writing it during the pandemic.
Someone else who shares Joan's comedic DNA? Her grandson, Edgar Cooper Endicott, 21, who Melissa says has "the same silly, sense of humor" as his grandmother.
As a longtime member of the E! family, Joan was never afraid to tell it like it was, no matter how good, bad or ugly.
"First of all, it's comedy," Melissa said about her mother's fashion critiques. "Second of all, at one point, people were being given tens of thousands of dollars worth of clothes, and a lot of it was like, ‘Really? Come on.'"
Melissa says her mother just wanted everyone to have fun and share a good laugh about the "0.1111 percent of the most beautiful people in the world."
When asked about the most outrageous look Melissa has ever seen on the red carpet with her mother, it was a no-brainer: Björk's infamous "swan dress."
"The swan dress, still to this day is right up there," she shared. "And then you have Cher's outfits and you got all that, but who's ever going to forget that dress?"
Check out the full interview with Melissa in the clip above.
Lies My Mother Told Me: Tall Tales From a Short Woman is available now where books are sold.