Ten Steps to Nanette

by Hannah Gadsby

It had all begun with my obsession with Hamish’s imaginary friends and the mounting distress I felt because they didn’t want to be my friends too. I hadn’t known what “imaginary” meant and had just assumed that Hamish had cool friends who refused to talk to me, which made for many toilet-time tears.

Another striking element of the very bad book that I don’t recall authoring was the high level of violence, bloodthirst and death it contained, not to mention how matter-of-factly seven-year-old me described the guts and gore of it all. I should have been given counselling, not a Pink Panther sticker.

If you are distressed by things like assault, molestation, rape, injury, isolation, suicidal ideation, body image or other mental health difficulties, please read on with caution, if you decide to read on at all.

Nanette’s success might have taken me completely by surprise, but the backlash that followed it was entirely expected.

I kind of agree on one level, a comedy show that is defiantly unfunny has no right being crowned the “next big thing in comedy.” But I didn’t do the crowning, so I don’t know what the fuck they want me to do about it.

I was always aware of all the big hitters of American comedy, of course I was, because that’s how aggressive cultural imperialism works, but I never felt inspired enough to think of it as any kind of relevant benchmark for myself.

If an audience of lesbians don’t like your comedy, they will shut you down. And lesbians don’t need to retreat to the safety of the internet, either, they’ll hold you to account right there and then. And I’m not talking about quaint interventions like heckling or booing. It’s so much worse than that. It’s cold.

I’ve only recently been able to comprehend just how terrible a life I’d been leading. Sure, I was alive, but that was about it; I didn’t have anything to look forward to, much less a dream to fall back on.

I don’t find it insulting that not many people know where in the world I’m from. The point of the exercise is not to expose the ignorance of others, but rather, to convey the sense that I grew up a long way away from nowhere. And the reason I do that is because I believe the obscure isolation of my childhood is a key ingredient in the complex recipe of my identity.

There were at least eight different establishments where you could buy fish-and-chips in Smithton. This is a remarkable statistic given the population was not large enough to support this level of market competition.

This is not to say I hated school. I loved it. I loved the structure of it. Every day I knew exactly where I had to be and what I had to do and if I didn’t, I was safe in the knowledge that someone would tell me.

Nothing ever changed in the world that Nan and Pop lived in. Nothing. Not their home or the rhythms they kept within it.

It was impossible to tell how long I spent at Nan and Pop’s on any given day, as everything was so consistent it felt as if time warped and stood still as it did.

had been more than a little disappointed when I first laid my eyes on the pink girl’s bike under the Christmas tree a few weeks earlier. As far as I was concerned, I didn’t need a floral basket or a skirt-friendly pedalling experience, I needed a BMX so I could keep up with Hamish.

It is only now, after a significant chunk of life has passed since, that I can recognise that Mum was not always the right target, she was just the easy one. So, I would like to ask that if you find yourself judging my mother harshly, just keep it in mind that I can be a lazy hunter and Dad is a parental gazelle.

as she was fond of saying to me when I was a teenager, “I will always love you no matter what, but I don’t have to like you.”

I am so grateful to be able to look back at my childhood and find this pocket of my memory filled with knowing I was safe, that I belonged, and that I had a right to exist. Because these are the memories that were to become my tether once life began to pull me deeper and deeper into a world where safety and belonging were not things I was capable of achieving on my own.

You need to know that when I was a kid, Tasmania was a joke to the rest of Australia, and Tasmanians were considered the ignorant, inbred, backward homophobic descendants of criminals and other feral types.

Australia, rather ostentatiously (and insensitively) if you ask me, reenacted the “first fleet” of 1788 that sailed uninvited into Sydney Harbour, but without the convicts, scurvy and attempted genocide.

Hamish had also signed up for Stamp Explorer, and we talked giddily about it on the bus home from school. Our excitement boiled down to just one thing—and it wasn’t the accumulation of stamps—it was the promise of mail. Our own mail. Mail that we could open. Mail addressed to us.

Stamp Explorer turned out to be every bit as boring an enterprise as you could imagine. It really is something when you can make collecting and organising objects boring to a young kid with autism spectrum disorder. But that’s exactly what Stamp Explorer managed to do.

For the second time that day, I was told I had to pay attention to my mental health. It was not exactly a Sophie’s choice for me; I couldn’t take my mental health seriously. I had carved my on-stage persona around the fact that I was depressed. “Get on top of it,” said the doctor. “Take it seriously, please,” she implored.

Of all my exes before Sam, I had lived with exactly zero of them, because they had, correctly, assessed me as unsuitable for cohabitation. My preferred term is: unlivable-with-able.

All of us who were performing that night were linked by a comradery, a common sense of purpose; we all understood that the audience and the stage were something we were sharing. It gave me a glimpse into a world that comedy might have been had it not been defined by so many brittle egos with loud voices.

Just imagine how brilliant I could have been if I hadn’t been given such a shit show at such a vulnerable time in my life.

They say that time heals all wounds, and while I’m certain that time is better at wound care than Vicks VapoRub, time alone is not enough. Effort is required.

It’s not that I wanted to forget the jokes, I loved them, I really did. I needed them for a long time, and I know that if it hadn’t been for all the armour they provided me over the years, I probably wouldn’t have been able to find the self-acceptance that I now possess. But the story was wrong and it was incomplete.

I decided that I did not want to waste any more of my precious energy trying to police what others have to say about my body or even try and change what it is they believe my body says about my worth as a human.

I know that so long as my body is understood as female, then my body will always be a target for the hostility and cruel judgment of others.

Even in this, her most raw state, Nanette did not feel like a comedy show…she felt more like someone, me, had kicked off at a family reunion and no one had seen it coming.

When I got home after that first trial, the only thing I remembered was being triggered. I am ashamed to admit that this was when I first truly understood that what I was attempting to do was quite dangerous, not just for my audience but also for me.

I would also tell you to never write a show out of your own trauma and then perform it two hundred times all over the world. That is more likely to shorten your life than experimenting with a bit of molly.