Hannah Gadsby

“Art is restoration: the idea is to repair the damages that are inflicted in life, to make something that is fragmented—which is what fear and anxiety do to a person—into something whole.”

—louise bourgeois

as I’m writing this, I am on pretty good terms with the Dragon

I have skills, people, I know what I am doing, even if you don’t like it.

I needed my audience to feel safe so that I could take that safety away and not give it back. Why? Because that is the shape of trauma.

The purpose of Nanette was never to catapult me into the top rung of the comedy conversation, quite the opposite, I was trying to cull my audience, I was trying to find my small pocket of genuine fans so I could be who I wanted to be on stage, without worrying about making a broad audience feel comfortable. But from the very first time I performed Nanette my audience refused to let me push them away, they made it clear that they understood my pain and that they cared. And so, what I had thought would effectively seal me off into an obscure corner of both my life and my art form instead became something far bigger than me, something of an international cultural phenomenon that not only shook the comedy world out of its tree but pushed my own existence into a shape I no longer recognise.

I owe stand-up comedy my life: it gave me the platform and the purpose to playfully interrogate my own story and unravel the immature and sometimes toxic versions of events that my younger, traumatised brain had settled on.

When I first tried stand-up, I was in my late twenties and too old to begin a career that demands all the best habits of young people, such as late-night loitering, talking about yourself all the time and masking low self-esteem with false confidence.

I declared, when I was about eight years old, that I wanted to be a dog when I grew up, and she counselled me to consider a more practical vocation, like not being so bloody stupid.

I think I was about twelve when she casually flicked my writing ambitions out of contention by observing, “But you don’t have anything to say. You have to be interesting to be a writer, you know.”

I was never interested in the results of any given activity. As far as I was concerned, the only reason to do something was so that you could do it again. And again. And again.