On 3 August 2012, the American comedian Tig Notaro decided to change her life. The prospect in itself didn’t scare her. After all, she’d already gone through an extraordinary number of life changes in the previous year. “Four months,” Notaro quickly and firmly corrects me when we meet at her house in Los Angeles. “It all happened in four months.”
Before, Notaro had always been lucky. “Tig Luck”, her friends would call it, fondly. She was the kind of person who would find five $100 bills in a car park after a comedy gig, who would announce that she wanted a cat and then find a stray kitten curled up in her driveway, looking for a home. She happily moseyed through what she calls “a seamless life”, one in which for years she was a reasonably successful standup in the US with occasional roles in cult TV shows (The Office, Community, The Sarah Silverman Program) and films (In A World…).
Then in March 2012, at the age of 40, she collapsed in overwhelming pain. Her then girlfriend drove her to hospital. She was suffering from so much internal swelling doctors couldn’t identify her individual organs. She was eventually diagnosed with Clostridium difficile (C diff), a potentially fatal condition in which bacteria attack the intestinal lining. Even after she started to recover, her weight continued to plummet to below seven stone. One week after getting out of hospital she got a call from her stepfather to tell her that her mother, Susie, had tripped and hit her head at home and was now in a coma, about to die. Soon after her mother’s funeral, still frail from the C diff and poleaxed by grief, Notaro casually mentioned to her doctor that she had a lump in each of her breasts.
“I went in for my mammogram feeling I was being quite thorough in my preventative care,” Notaro writes in her new memoir. “I didn’t feel as if I was waiting to hear if I had cancer. I felt as if I was waiting to hear I didn’t have cancer.”
On 25 July, the doctor called: she had cancer in both breasts – invasive stage two, she was later told, and she would need a double mastectomy. Oh, and she and her girlfriend were breaking up. It was, Notaro recalls in a deadpan voice that hovers between ironical understatement and embarrassment about all the drama, “a pretty crazy time”.
The day she got that diagnosis, Notaro decided to take what little control she could. She had a regular slot at LA comedy club Largo in nine days’ time, and she decided to go ahead with it, believing this might well be her last show.
“Hello. Good evening. Hello. I have cancer, how are you?” she asked the crowd that night, as casually as if she were asking if it was anyone’s birthday. The crowd laughed, certain a punchline was around the corner. “Hi, is everyone having a good time? I have cancer,” she continued. Some people continued to laugh, but others gasped, realising the truth. “Oh my God!” Notaro whispered, the words just sinking in for her, too.
That set, in which Notaro talked about everything that had happened to her, changed her life more than either of her terrible illnesses. It was an extraordinary gig, not just for the personal revelations, but for the way she turned the then tragedy of her life into comedy in a way that went beyond simple black humour. The sense of spontaneity in her delivery, the artless honesty and her unsentimental wit combined to give the event a feeling of real intimacy, as if your closest friend was telling you about their diagnosis for the first time.
“I’m single and I would love to meet somebody so [my internet dating] profile…?” she wondered aloud. “‘I have cancer. Serious inquiries only.’ I don’t know! That’s all I have going on now.”
At one point she asked the audience if she should just tell silly jokes. “No!” they shouted. “This is fucking amazing!” a man yelled at the back, and everyone applauded. “Oh,” murmured Notaro, stunned.
Immediately after the show audience members were tweeting and blogging about it, including some of Notaro’s high-profile comedy friends. One of these was Louis CK, to my mind probably the greatest living standup, who tweeted: “In 27 years doing this, I’ve seen a handful of truly great, masterful standup sets. One was Tig Notaro last night at Largo.” Word of this gig, which only a handful had seen, was soon all over the internet.
Louis CK begged Notaro to let him sell a recording of it through his website. Eventually, she agreed and called it Live – pronounced with a short “i”, like an order to herself not to die. In its first week, it outsold the new album by Kiss, which especially pleased Notaro, a longtime Kiss fan; it went on to be nominated for a Grammy award. With one gig, Notaro had become a bona fide star. Which was all great, of course – except first, she had to deal with possibly dying.
Notaro lives in a stylish, airy house in the Hollywood hills, just off the motorway but up a windy, quiet road that eats up phone reception. It’s the perfect place for someone who has to work a lot in the Hollywood melee but wants to live in almost rural privacy. As I arrive, an American TV crew is just leaving; four years on, everyone still wants to talk to Notaro. In her usual tomboyish outfit of jeans, a T-shirt and a thick cardigan, she ushers out one lot of journalists and welcomes another, perfectly at ease with spending yet more hours with a stranger probing the most intimate details of her life.
She still has the skinny body of someone who has gone through a severe medical trauma, but her health is good – so good that, since 2012, she’s had a schedule that would exhaust a healthy teenager. As well as appearing in TV shows including Inside Amy Schumer and the brilliant Amazon series Transparent, last summer Netflix released a documentary about her, Tig, which focuses on life since 2012, including her then burgeoning relationship with Stephanie Allynne, an actress who looks as if she walked out of a Botticelli painting. The two of them married last autumn. One month after that, HBO put out her standup comedy special Boyish Girl Interrupted, in which she performs part of the show bare-chested, showing her scars to the audience (she did not have reconstructive surgery after her double mastectomy).
“It felt awesome,” she grins, when I ask how it felt to take her shirt off on stage. “I had the idea in a crazy, maniacal way the day I came home from the hospital when I felt really insecure and damaged and sad. But the thought just kept coming up and, yeah, it’s a political statement but I also wanted to make the statement in a funny way.”
That Notaro has become such a specialist in self-revelation surprises no one more than her. Before 2012, her comedy hovered between sweetly surreal setups and skilful one-liners, the sort of dry humour loved by listeners of NPR’s This American Life, to which she contributed, all delivered in an impassive voice that suggests both detachment and straight-down-the-line honesty. Typical jokes included a riff on a bee travelling alongside her on the motorway, and a shaggy dog story about the year she kept bumping into 1980s pop star Taylor Dayne.
Why did she decide to talk about her most personal life at the Largo show? “I think several things were going on,” she says. “It was me taking control of the narrative, and I think it was me asking for help as well. Because I had friends and family, but I also felt very, very alone.”
Does it bother her that it was only by baring her soul that she became so successful?
“I feel fine with it. I… I feel, even though it was personal, I always go back to that it was still just my standup. I guess it just took me to the next level,” she says, with enough hesitancy to suggest it has taken her a while to get used to being, as she puts it, “Tig the Truth-Teller”. The title of her memoir, I’m Just A Person, is a reference to what she would tell herself whenever she wondered why all this bad stuff was happening to her (“You’re just a person, why not you?”). It’s also what she now says to people who treat her as a spokeswoman for cancer survival.
Mathilde Notaro (“Tig” was a childhood nickname that stuck) was born in Mississippi and raised in Texas, but her accent is more laconic west coast than liquid southern. Her father, Pat, was at most a sporadic presence in her life, but her mother, Susie, judging from Notaro’s memoir, was so dazzling she outshone everyone in the room. She saw the party in everything, even a school sports day; as soon as her kids were in bed, she would go out dancing until dawn.
“She was just so outrageous and funny and without any boundaries,” smiles Notaro. Her mother accepted her daughter just as she was, defending seven-year-old Tig when others asked why she refused to wear pretty dresses, preferring T-shirts and jeans: “My mother was so stylish, but she never pushed that on me. She always thought I looked cool,” she says.
Notaro struggled at school, and her confidence was truly shot when she was 12 and opened a letter from her school to her parents suggesting she might need special education. Mortified, she never passed the letter on, choosing instead, she writes in her memoir, to hide “the envelope in my closet, right next to my latent homosexuality”. She ended up having to repeat three school years before finally dropping out in the 9th grade (the equivalent of year 10 in the UK), and making her way to LA and comedy.
Her progress was slow and involved a fair amount of time sleeping in her car. But by her late 30s she was a favourite of influential TV and radio hosts, such as Conan O’Brien and NPR’s Ira Glass.
Notaro has always been open about her sexuality, but it is not something she touches on in her comedy. She looks flat-out surprised when I ask when she realised she was gay: “Ummm, about 19?” she replies, as if taken aback that someone would be interested in something so unimportant. Despite coming from a religious, military, southern background, she says her family were really supportive when she came out to them at 20. In her Largo set, she refers to her double mastectomy as a “forced transition”: did her operation make her feel differently about herself as a woman?
“No, no. I’ve always felt like a tomboy, and that hasn’t changed,” she says. It is, though, she says, an interesting time when it comes to gender identity: “I don’t think that it’s as black and white as people think. Just all that sickening pink and blue, and boy and girl stuff, I think that’s where the problem comes in, when people are being choked to death by being told how they should be. My mother always thought I looked adorable in my cowboy boots.”
I tell her I was struck by something Amy Schumer once said to Vanity Fair about Notaro: “Looking masculine and being gay, the challenges of the road are 20 times harder for Tig than other female comedians. People fear what they don’t understand.” Has she found that to be true?
Anger sparks in Notaro’s normally calm eyes. “I don’t know what she was talking about. It sounds like offensive nonsense to me. I find that so offensive and weird,” she says, looking down, trying to control her very audible irritation. “If you knew me well, you would never say that.”
I thought the two of you were friends, I say, surprised. Schumer has spoken in the past about taking care of her “great friend Tig”.
“Ummm…” Notaro says, looking away. Did you just work with her? The atmosphere, previously relaxed, has palpably prickled.
“I’ve worked with her. I worked with her for the first season [of Inside Amy Schumer],” she replies curtly. Ironically, the episode in which Notaro appeared was about Schumer exaggerating their friendship and using Notaro’s cancer to look good in front of other people.
“Let’s leave it there,” Notaro says, closing down the subject.
I say how supportive Notaro’s close circle of LA friends, especially comedian Sarah Silverman and film-maker Lake Bell, seem to have been during her illness. “They were. People complain about Hollywood comedians, but I feel like I selected a tremendous group, ones who aren’t fame-obsessed. So I was taken care of,” she pauses a beat. “But there were some inauthentic people wanting to take care of me, just to look good.”
So you could be their anecdote?
“Yes! And I started to sniff that out and I was like, ‘Oh! This is so gross!’ and I got out of there as quickly as I could,” she says, careful to mention no names.
Although Notaro had plenty of girlfriends in her life, it wasn’t until she met Allynne that, she says, “I understood the importance of marriage, because I didn’t know how not to be with her. Part of that is because everything I went through really opened me up [to being with someone], but really, the majority of the credit should go to Stephanie for being an extraordinary person.”
But their courtship wasn’t straightforward. For a start, Notaro had had her mastectomy only four months previously. But the main hurdle was that Allynne had never before been with a woman, and it took her a while to recognise her feelings. After a few months, she did, and the two have been inseparable since. They had a “huge” wedding last October, getting married on the beach in Mississippi in front of 270 people. “I think my friends were all like, ‘What’s this gay wedding in Mississippi going to be like?’” Notaro says.
As she talks about Allynne, I notice that she keeps looking at the house across the street. She laughs and explains it’s because that’s where Allynne’s mother lives, and Allynne is having tea there while we talk; Allynne’s brother and his girlfriend live in Notaro’s guesthouse.
“We have a little commune,” she says proudly, marvelling at her Tig Luck.
The most moving storyline in the Netflix documentary had nothing to do with Notaro’s health, her mother or her relationship with Allynne: rather, it was her attempt to have a baby. Before she was diagnosed with cancer, Notaro started looking into ways of starting a family on her own. Once she was in recovery, she decided to try with the help of a surrogate. So, against the advice of her oncologist, she delayed starting the hormone blockers, which would help prevent the return of the cancer, so as to harvest her eggs. She would have just one shot at this. She named the one viable embryo Jack Notaro.
“I truly believed that there was no way I could go through all I went through and not have a child. At least the universe would dole that out,” Notaro tells me. The scene where she receives the news that the implantation was not successful is utterly devastating, even more so for Notaro’s characteristically understated response: “I see,” she says, her jaw locking.
It is incredible that she experienced this moment with a camera crew in her face, I say. “There’s no way I would have agreed to [have the cameras there] if I hadn’t been so positive the IVF would be successful. It was brutal,” she agrees. But while her face is serious, her voice is light, free now of the pain from that time. Because as she is talking, there are a handful of balloons in the corner behind her, leftovers from a baby shower her stepfather and brother threw for her two days ago. Resting by the front door are two baby car seats: Notaro and Allynne are expecting twins, due later this month via a surrogate. Notaro is wary about talking about them, but she can’t suppress her bright-eyed excitement. When I show her a photo of my own twin babies, she becomes a little tearful: “Oh my God…” she says, looking at mine and thinking of hers.
Will she talk about the babies in her standup? “Yeah. Oh yeah! A lot of comedians get a bad rep once they have kids and that’s all they talk about and people are like, ‘I don’t want to hear about your kids!’ I’m like, ‘Prepare yourselves. That’s all I’m going to talk about.’”
‘I couldn’t bring myself to look down’: Tig Notaro on life after breasts
I was in a fog when my surgeon came in after my double mastectomy. She had a great bedside manner. It seemed entirely impossible that this friendly, easygoing woman had just finished cutting into my flesh and pulling out globs of tissue. She smiled and said she had some good news: she believed the cancer had not spread and that she had got it all.
A stream of friends came by, but I was so jacked up on painkillers that my hospital room looked like a party going on around someone who had overdosed before the guests had arrived. My face was greasy, my tits were off, and it looked like a horse had been chewing on my hair since 1977. The only thing I had going for me was I could use the bathroom on my own.
For a month after being discharged, I was at the mercy of kind friends who fought for the chance to bring me food, help me get dressed, and drain the blood and gunk coming from my chest – which I couldn’t bring myself to look at.
Instead, I Googled images of “bilateral double mastectomy”. The worse the photos looked, the more certain I was that my chest looked like that. I never let myself glance down. Even when I was able to start showering, I let the running water clean my chest while I stared straight at the ceiling.
But I knew I had to consider my chest’s future. I met with several reconstructive surgeons, and each meeting left me wondering why on earth I would go through such intense procedures just to have fake boobs. My chest was barely anything to begin with, so why go through such pain and recovery time for something that wouldn’t be noticed? I’d essentially be surgically attaching the equivalent of two kiwis (less hair, no stickers). So I settled on no reconstructive surgery, which meant no boobs, no nipples, just nice, uneven scars.
One morning when I was brushing my teeth, I leaned toward the mirror and caught a startling glimpse of swollen, bruised flesh crisscrossed with black stitching, which made me feel as though I had been in a horrible accident instead of expertly tended to by a surgeon. That grisly sight confirmed that I didn’t want to see any more of what I was now calling my “Frankenchest”. But someone had to. And unfortunately for her, it was my friend Lake. She had come over for a visit, and after chatting for several hours, I asked if she’d look at my chest – a typical move on my part, I must say. She agreed, but I could sense her fear as I slowly lifted my shirt. Immediately I saw relief in her face. “Tiggy,” she said. “You can do this. You can totally do this.”
A couple of days later, I stood in front of a mirror and slowly unbuttoned my shirt. When I looked down, what I saw turned out to be just a flat chest with fresh scars on their way to looking healed. My stitches had dissolved. I took my shirt off and stared at myself, thinking, “Lake was right, I can do this.”
The next month, I moved from LA to New York City to write and appear on Comedy Central’s new show Inside Amy Schumer. Before the surgery I had been dating Jessie, a gorgeous woman I had known for a while. She also happened to be temporarily living in New York City while she starred in an off-Broadway musical, and one night, she invited me over. I got into bed wearing my T-shirt. It was winter and the heater was cranked. I told Jessie that I was sorry, but I needed to take off my shirt. She said, “Of course,” and lay back to wait.
I was now facing the exact moment I had been dreading – my first topless romantic encounter. Jessie and I had been out to dinner a few weeks after my surgery, when I was still struggling to look down, and I asked if it would freak her out to see my scars. She said it wouldn’t. I asked again, and she replied that no, it wouldn’t freak her out at all. I asked her one more time just to make sure and she said, “To be totally honest, I fucking love scars!” Wow. If there’s one thing I do have to bring to this relationship, I thought, by God, it’s scars.
The amount of confidence she gave me that night is beyond words. I went from uncomfortably adjusting and readjusting my shirts to hide my new body to wanting to wear fitted T-shirts, and it was all because Jessie said she thought scars were sexy.
Now, in bed, was the moment of truth. I sat up on my knees facing her as she was lying down and took off my T-shirt to reveal my bare chest with its two-inch scars in place of my two-inch breasts. “Oh my God! You’re so hot!” she said, pulling me toward her. “You look so sexy!”
When I returned home to LA from New York, I looked anxiously around my apartment. My unmade bed, my dirty cup in the sink. It was the scene before the crime. I was staring at my assumption that life would continue to go on right where it had left off. I spent an entire day in and out of a paralysing panic attack. I could only sit very still on my couch, trying to breathe. I felt like I was about to lose my balance and fall off not only the couch, but the planet entirely.
I guess being anonymous and misplaced in New York had stalled this anxiety, because it turned out to be the final panic attack about all that had happened to me; a few days later, on the morning of 1 January 2013, I suddenly landed right back into my body, feeling like the world’s most experienced and knowledgeable infant. Breathing was as easy as doing nothing. I was ready to embark on a new life
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