With the unfortunate exception of menus and cash registers, the idea of “disruption” now feels like a prepandemic phenomenon. But Hannah Gadsby …
With the unfortunate exception of menus and cash registers, the idea of “disruption” now feels like a prepandemic phenomenon. But Hannah Gadsby breathes new life into the concept in her best-selling book, “Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation,” which takes the usual looking-back-on-it-all format and gives it a few worthwhile tweaks.
For starters, the “comedy-destroying, soul-affirming” Australian comedian behind the Netflix comedy special “Nanette” places an epilogue near the beginning of her first (published) book. “I wanted to place myself in how I imagined people knew me,” Gadsby said in a phone interview. “And try to hint at, I’m new to this world of fame. Because if you have success on a reasonably large scale, people assume that’s your world and that’s your milieu, and it’s just absolutely not.” She added, “I didn’t want it to be a rags-to-riches story. I wanted it to be a confusion-to-more-confusion story.”
In addition to her unconventional structuring, Gadsby employs footnotes with the fluency of a tenured professor and a chatty honesty not seen in marginalia since 2000, when Dave Eggers wrote his “memoir-y kind of thing,” “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.” The first one — a trigger warning — appears at the end of the introduction, which actually comes before the epilogue; just go with it. The rest, sometimes stacking up to four or five at the bottom of a page, are Gadsby’s musings and elaborations on her own revelations.
“The text was threatening to spiral out of control because of the level of detail that my brain wants,” said Gadsby, who writes about being diagnosed with autism and A.D.H.D. as an adult. “A lot of my humor is also that sort of destabilizing aside. Also I’m a bit of a nerd and I love a footnote.” Side note to audiobook devotees: Gadsby’s footnotes are gracefully woven into her narration.
As for whether she received pushback for her noncommittal subtitle or the shape of the book as a whole, Gadsby said, “These specifics not so much, but there have been a lot of conversations because I was trying to bridge a gap between my natural atypical neurological communication style — I’d write the whole [expletive] thing in bullet points if I could.” She added, “There were often conversations where I was pushing the more blunt and less writerly way of communicating. But it was always a conversation and push and pull. Ultimately the publishers have really come through with the autism of it all.”
Elisabeth Egan is an editor at the Book Review and the author of “A Window Opens.”
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