I’m a Lot, the debut memoir from comedian and writer Alison Leiby, showcases her signature deadpan humor and combines it with sincere reflection to create a memorable memoir-in-essays that unravels the expectations put on modern women. Drenched in wit, her writing unpacks everything from the impact of a near-death experience to the highs of discount shopping, and even the joys of being a “Housewives” stan. Pushing back against the narrow definitions women are told they need to fit into, Leiby embraces the joy of unrepentantly living every one of your identities.
I spoke with Leiby about the complexities of writing a memoir, the pressure to be palatable, and why humor was integral to her essays.
Brie Ward: Hi Alison! First of all, congratulations on the publication of I’m a Lot! Your essays cover a lot of ground, but it’s your near-death experience that opens the book. In a lot of ways you make it clear how that moment did not define you. How did you think about approaching retelling this story for a new audience and how it fit into the book as a whole?
Alison Leiby: The story of almost dying was always going to be the first one in the book, even before I really knew what else I wanted to include. It’s a moment in my life that truly does inform so much of what happens next, but also, as you say, is not something I want to be defined by. I wanted to set it up as an explanation for so many parts of who I am without it eclipsing them, so I wanted to really set the table of the book with this one. I think writing it true to the darkness and intensity with which I experienced it, but also littering the story with jokes and asides can hopefully give the reader a sense of who I am and how I think about this hugely impactful experience I survived.
BW: It feels like you so fearlessly push back against the many pressures to be palatable as a modern woman, and it makes me wonder who you had in mind as you wrote. Do you consider this book to be for a younger version of yourself, young women today, or someone else entirely?
AL: I think that this book is really for younger me/women and also current day older me/women. These essays are a roadmap for how to embrace all of the parts of you as you move through life, even if they don’t fit with what the world expects of women. But they’re also, to me, permission to feel okay about those things that at the time I maybe did not feel okay being or expressing. We don’t have to look back at the more challenging versions of ourselves or more difficult experiences and feel guilt, we can just feel like that is who we were and what we went through and all of that makes you the person you are today.
BW: I’d love to know how the framing of the memoir came to be. Was it always based around these identity labels? Or was reclaiming them part of the revision process?
AL: When I started writing the proposal I didn’t really know what the organizing principle was going to be. I had essays I knew I wanted to write, like my love of Loehmann’s shopping and being debridesmaided from my friend’s wedding. And I knew I wanted to organize the book around my experiences with my back surgeries and chronic pain. When I started to think about how these all tied together, I realized that so many of the stories or experiences I wanted to include were things I grasped onto tightly at the time and made my entire identity. Then once I landed on that idea, it was easier to think of the “me’s” I have been and how I arrived at those in my life.
BW: Several of the essays put forward choices or labels that still can feel somewhat taboo or make people uncomfortable. Did you feel any hesitation putting those front and center, or was that the goal?
AL: I wanted to write about the messier parts of life. I wrote the book after my 2022 off-Broadway run of my show, Oh God, A Show About Abortion, where I spent over an hour walking through all of the minutiae of getting an abortion. The point of that show was to de-stigmatize something that people rarely talk about. I really enjoyed writing with that aim, and so as I wrote these essays I wanted to try and recreate that for other parts of myself and my life.
BW: You balance introspection and humor beautifully throughout the book. How do you think about blending the two and delivering vulnerability without letting the jokes pull in the opposite direction?
AL: As a stand-up, my instinct is always to make a joke. I’ve written about my life on stage for nearly fifteen years, and covered a lot of my perspective and experience, but there are limits to what you can say if you’re just doing jokes. Writing this book was exciting because I got to explore and interrogate parts of myself and the world without needing to find a punchline every fifteen seconds. I actually worried that the book didn’t have enough jokes because my brain is so trained to stand-up rather than prose writing. I didn’t really have a formula or goal with the balance, I just wanted to make sure that it was funny enough to justify being a comedian writing about death and pain, while still also letting those topics breathe. I basically approached writing it with mimicking how I actually talk about these things in my life, which (I hope) is thoughtful but punctuated by very stupid jokes from time to time.
BW: In the final essay, you have one of the frankest descriptions of life with chronic pain I’ve ever read, and its impact on your identity. The way you describe identity as cumulative is incredibly compelling, but I’m curious how you thought about this portion of the book and what its inclusion meant to you?
AL: I saved writing the final essay until I had done several rounds of edits on the rest of the essays. I always knew I would end this book with the story of my last back surgery and how it has closed the loop on my journey of chronic pain. I had been thinking about this essay since before I even thought of the proposal for the book. When I recovered from my spinal fusion and was pain free for the first time in years, it really did shake my identity. I tried writing about it then, when it was more recent, and never quite landed on what I was trying to say about it. As I put the book together I was trying to sort out where it was all driving, and this idea started to reveal itself. I realized while my pain was gone, it will always be a part of who I am, and that’s true of all of these selves I’ve inhabited through my life.
BW: What was the process of writing such personal history like for you? How do you sort through what lived experience goes on the page and what’s just for you?
AL: I’ve always written a lot of autobiographical material on stage, so I didn’t have too hard a time putting some pretty revealing things about me in this book. But I did have a hard time deciding what goes in and what doesn’t. For me, it was the most helpful to think of the essays as a story I was trying to tell with a specific point, and whatever I include should move the reader toward that point or end. The debridesmaiding chapter, for example, is a story, but not the entire thing. There was another attempt to work on our friendship after and then that ended, too, but that part of the story wasn’t really necessary and didn’t feel fair to include. I wanted to write that essay to address how friendships change, and how putting them in transactional relation to each other is always dangerous. I think ending the story where I did achieves that in a way that continuing on the story might not.
BW: What do you hope people take away from the book?
AL: I hope that people come away from this book with more gentleness toward themselves. It’s certainly not a self help book or trying to be inspirational. But I have learned through thinking about my life and writing about it for this, that even I need to be gentler to myself. The parts of our selves are all important, even when we think they’re not. They all fit together to create the person we are.
And I hope people laugh a lot.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Alison Leiby is a two-time WGA Award–nominated writer. She has written for Life & Beth, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and The President Show, and was a writer and executive producer for Ilana Glazer’s Comedy on Earth for Comedy Central. Her critically acclaimed solo show Oh God, A Show About Abortion, which ran at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York, was named the Best Political Comedy of the year by The New York Times. Alison’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York magazine, McSweeney’s, Vice, The Onion, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, and many others. Her podcast Ruined has been named one of Time magazine’s top ten podcasts of the year.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Brie Ward is a speculative fiction writer. Her work has appeared in midnight & indigo and London Fog Literary. She’s a contributing editor at Moonday Mag. She has been a Storyboard resident. She lives in California with her family.