489 - How to Make Your Work More Personal with Comedian Alice Fraser

34:34And it was like, it was so great. It was great. It was great. And I really liked Ted. I just, you know, I don't know him that well, but I like his sensibility and I like a lot of that. we have a very similar taste in a lot of, in a lot of, um, standup and he's a fucking delight. He is a delight. Um, uh, but, uh, I don't remember. I was, I was gonna, I was gonna go somewhere with that and I can't remember what it is, but, um, you don't know him very well, but that's ADHD baby. Um, uh, yeah, I don't know. I don't know him, but, oh, oh, I know what it was. one of my, I was going to, the context was I've only had probably five conversations with Ted.

35:15Yes. But one of the early ones that I had three or four years ago was when I was starting to consider making this special, this right side out special. And it was in a conversation with him where I felt like that for the first time, I felt that feeling of, oh my God, I'm doing something with this burden of grief that I've had my entire life. I've had this and it's always present. And I'm like, this is the first time I've ever done something with it. And it was, and I could feel like, oh, I have to do it now. And so now that's such a huge part of what I want to do with the show and the future and just whatever I do is just encourage people to take those things and do something creative with them.

36:11You've been carrying them around. Like you might as well use them. You've got them in your backpack and they're like weighing you down. You can't unpack them. So you might as well use them, I guess. Yeah. And I just couldn't believe that it, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know why it felt so unique to me. It really felt like a bad metaphor, but an alchemy thing. If you're taking something so shit and you're turning it into something that is not shit.

37:00One thing I wanted to ask you about in your shows, your latest special is very much related to being a mom. A lot of the show you're talking about not wanting to do a show about being a mom. And I just thought, you know, you had, you felt like, oh, you had to work through a lot of baggage for that. But you'd also done a lot of work about being a daughter. Yes. And I just wondered if you, how you wrestled with like, why, why would being, why would doing work about being a mom be so different than doing work about being a daughter? Like when they, when they're, they have a connection. Well, because everyone's a daughter.

37:47Right. But being a daughter isn't a translation of self in the way that being a mother is. um being so there's this kind of pressure in the arts particularly in comedy but also generally on educated women right to be successful and we define success as against the masculine So you want to be successful in the way that men can be successful and are successful. And so when you talk about women who are successful and mothers, it's about how they maintain their careers in the face of motherhood. Often, not always, but often means being less good mothers or less holistic mothers or sharing the burden of motherhood with a supportive partner or a number of other people or nannies or whatever it happens to be.

38:49and that there is this way in which, and I don't know where I got this impression, which is why it's fascinating, but it's an impression that I have and that I've encountered in a lot of other women, which is that essentially being a mother is surrendering to the base animalistic side of yourself and the admirable thing about success or being human or what's good about people is that they rise above that and you live in the intellectual sphere and you are not of your body. We're above the body. We're better than that. And that is, you know, that's why Greek statues have tiny penises because you're not meant to be basically controlled by the lusts and urges of your reproductive organs, right?

39:39And obviously it's nonsense. We're all embodied. You need sleep to work. You need all of this stuff. But the idea essentially that I had received was that becoming a mother makes you less an artist or you won't care about the things that you care about anymore because this priority shift comes in. And that's bad. It's bad to change what you care about because what you care about is the highest and greatest thing, which is artistic success. And so I had sort of absorbed this idea to the extent that I thought, not that I didn't want to become a mother, but that I didn't want to tell people. I didn't announce my first pregnancy until I was eight and a half months pregnant because I wanted to put it off, put off the shift in attitude to me.

40:34and put off the shift in identity until I absolutely could no longer deny that this had happened and that this was happening and that it's immensely fruitful and interesting and fascinating and intellectual. You know, if you are paying attention to what you're doing, it's fucking incredible and artistic and all of those things. And that, you know, that your body is doing something extraordinary that involves all of you and that it changes the way you think about everything you do. Like I got the insight, like if you've got the ADHD type brain, I've never been diagnosed with ADHD. I just, I sort of, it's not sufficiently a problem for me, except that I find it useful to think of like brains in sort of vague camps.

41:22Same. That's the main reason I, it's useful to me as well. But yeah. But like the, it was the first time when you're pregnant, you go, oh, actually, I'm part of the work of being pregnant is going, do I need a little snack? I should probably have a bit of a sit, right? It is being tuned into your body and paying attention to your body and to your needs rather than rising above and driving through and staying up late and pushing on. Actually, incredibly important part of this work that you're doing, and it is work, is the surrender part of the equation, is the taking your foot off the accelerator part of it.

42:01and this I was pregnant during COVID and so at the same time I was suddenly confronted with the fact that my work schedule which I'd always sort of constructed in this really haphazard way that I felt guilty about I was always bouncing from one thing to another and riding my stuff on the bus on the way in and all you know sort of piling up things or I'd work in a cafe but my computer wouldn't have charge so I could only work for 40 minutes and then I'd go to the next cafe all of that stuff went away and I was confronted with the reality that actually it's not chaos that I need it's just really hard on time and then I need to go for a walk and that's and the walk is essential to the process it's not failing at the process it's not stopping the process it's not stepping away from the process.

42:55It is the process. It's the work. The work is taking your brain off the task and going for a walk and letting the team in the back rooms sort it out so that when you come back to the page, the will guy at the front can apply himself back to the page. But the will guy is not the boss. Yes. He's just one of many equally important parts of this process. And I kind of had to really just, you know, sit with that for 10 months and just go, oh, everything that I've thought about what work is for me, what this kind of work is, has been wrong. And I've been beating myself up for doing something that was actually not just necessary, oh, I've got to do it, but like important and valuable and as valuable as the other parts of the work.

43:54I got diverted from your question. No, this is what I wanted to talk to you about. Actually, this is the number one thing, which was when you talked about in your latest special twist about being a mom and you were talking about how you were saying earlier about how, well, everybody has a daughter or everybody's a son. Everybody's a child of somebody, whereas not everybody has kids. And even if they do, not everybody pushes a kid out, right? That's a whole, that's a subset of people. And yet, you know, this is a cliche, but I think for a reason, the idea that in the specific lies, the universal, you know, things like, um, Hannah Gadsby, her specials are about several things that are, there's no part of the scantron where I fill in the same things that they fill in, right?

44:47Like they're totally, totally different. And yet it doesn't matter. It's that specificity does something. Um, it really hits home. And as you're telling your story, the thing I wanted to ask you about, which I deeply relate to is the Jungian way of talking about it as the second half of life, like two parts of life. And I actually think there's probably more than that. I think everybody, a huge theme on my show, I imagine over the next year is going to be this second half of life because things like COVID created this bookend thing for lots of people. And it's similar to what you have gone through and how it's closed certain doors and opened other doors and you're in this totally different time.

45:42And I am, I'm in this zone right now, where I went like, I was getting like stuck in my, how do I, I mean, I wanted to build more like joy into my life because I'd gotten, it's just, you know, it's been, I had a rough patch on a couple levels and really needed to prioritize that. And the way I started doing that was listing out all of the seasons of my life where I'd had a ton of joy, right? And thought, these are the things I need. I need like, you know, these kinds of meetups with some friends at the bar, like I had in college, or I need this thing and that thing and all. And I was making this huge list.

46:31I made a list of 10 things. Like these are the 10 things that I know make me joyful. But I also like, as I'm doing it, I'm like, this is wrong. I know this is wrong. I don't know why, but I know this is wrong. And I, and I think it's because the, those things weren't what gave me joy. Those were me leaning into the joyful things of those seasons. And now I can feel my kids are all older than nine and I've got a teenager and like, I can feel life is like, and my life right now is unlike any other time in my life. Yeah. Like, and it's one of the reasons why I'm struggling, but also that all of those things, the joyful things about those were learning to really like lean into the, what, what's cool about right now.

47:26And it's not the same stuff that it used to be. And so I don't know if I went on a giant thing cause it was hard to explain, but that's the thing I really was like tapped into at the end after I'd experienced that show was like, yeah, you do these things in your life and it changes who you thought you were. And it's a, and yeah, at some point in your life, you start realizing that, that, oh, you're not just this cohesive thing and it's from start to finish and it's going to stay that way. Does that, Okay, that was a huge sprawling mess of stuff. No, that made so much sense. And it's that thing of also when you're doing a show about motherhood, I was very conscious that there are people who take parenthood and they get really smug about it, like it makes you a better person.

48:16Right. Which is not entirely – I can see where they get that idea, but it's not entirely true. It forces you to do difficult things, and doing difficult things is a really good way to become a better person. Yeah. It can be. I think that's true. Some people use it as an excuse to become a worse person, but you cannot have children and decide to do difficult things and become a better person and be beyond generous and stretch yourself. And it's just with children, you have to. It presents you with serious challenges. If you take those challenges, it will make you a better person. But that's, there's a lot of ifs in there.

48:59Well, you're just signing up for, like, this is the thing, you're just signing up for more life, right? Children, more grief, more joy, more everything, more less sleep, more everything. And it's like anything in life where you go through a massive change or a massive transition, it's like puberty. If you were as a child, and I remember being a child and like a precocious little child and looking at teenagers and thinking, oh, my God, why would you be a teenager? Like why would you go through that? Like why are they being so stupid? Like why are they being so emotional? You know, as a 10-year-old, you're like, what is it?

49:39I don't want to do that. I don't want to. Why would I go through that? And then you suddenly realize, oh, yeah, you know, hormones and sex and being attracted to people and the incredible value of like, you know, just like the generative crush where you have a crush on some idiot and they like something and then you find out that thing. There are things that I found out that purely because I wanted to impress someone and I've forgotten who they were, but that thing is still like vitally important to my life and the way in which that drives growth and change and then, you know, this is the kind of person I want to be and the ways in which that's good and bad and everything.

50:15those big changes are you know but from from before the change you're looking at it with some skepticism because someone goes oh here take this pill it'll turn the universe inside out and you go oh actually no I'm quite happy with the universe the way it is you know yeah that you know I remember in in twist I say that everyone says oh you know there are two people born that day the mother and the child yeah and you go fuck you know it's taken me so long to like this um you tell me i just have to bin it and get a new self that's quite a daunting thing and i think now particularly where people are becoming mothers later in life where they've built an identity and they fought through all of these hardships and they've got this really strongly defended sense of self and they've got an established persona in the world in their business in their friendships who they are, they know who they are, and they are proud of who they are.

51:16And then the idea of having children is like, hey, the process is going to eat 20 % of your brain, it'll grow back different. Like, roll that dice, motherfucker, you know? Yep, yep. And of course it's daunting. Yes, it is. And that bit that you said about teenage years, I realized like, oh, I did the same thing watching my family members, you know, aunts, uncles, et cetera. Some of them went through extreme midlife crisis. And I remember thinking exactly what the kid thinks about the teenager, which is I'm never doing that. Like I, I am never, I'm going to make sure all of my decisions are such where I will not lose it half in my, you know, when I turned 40 and you know I don't think I'm gonna lose it but I am different like I am I and and I didn't I did not see that coming and I and the reason I bring it up is because it is deeply related to how I am doing my creative practice like I it has changed my relationship and I know from I don't know how much you want to give away about your your special but I know it's also changed your creative practice and what your priorities are and it's interesting in the exact way that I didn't want it to right and I'm delighted yes right and you're delighted yeah and you're glad about it and I and that you know and I mean it changed mine in all kinds of ways And some of them are, as I imagine, just knowing your trajectory a little bit of, you know, doing this book and doing all these different podcasts, et cetera, that, you know, some of the ways that my relationship to my creativity has changed in ways I didn't want it to before I got here.

53:12and now I'm like yeah but now I'm doing I it actually has made my creativity better in a bunch of ways too um that's a lot of vagueness but yeah I know it it really and really you know it really has and you say in your in one of your creative pep talks I can't remember which um but like the obstacle is the prompt yeah right yes true yeah exactly that figuring out what about what you do is important to you if you can't do it the way you've been doing it and the way I had been doing my creative practice stand-up comedy is in many ways the minimum viable product for the ideas that I have because you have the idea and you can try it that night in a comedy club and it works or it doesn't work and there's a really swift feedback loop and you know immediately if it's working or it's not working and you can hone a show and you've got the festivals so you've got deadlines and applications that are due and you know when you're meant to be doing things and I would know at this time of year I would know where on what stage I would be standing at 8 p.m on the 6th of August for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and I would have to have a show by then it would have to be of a certain quality and like all of those things sort of crowded out any choices in my life because it was just the next thing and the next thing and the next thing and I was happy and I was doing this work but actually if I can't do this work in this way um for the reasons that I describe in the show what am I trying to do with the work what's the function of the work what's important to me about it and how can I do that in other ways and now the stuff that I'm doing I'm running these writers meetings I'm running a writer's retreat in Switzerland in September.

54:58I know. And then that kind of the part of me that wanted to be an academic, I get to, like, teach and cultivate and help people do their work, and then that prompts me to think more interesting things about my own work. And I've got a book and I'm doing a show with the book because doing, you know, before I couldn't justify doing a show. But if it's the book and the show, then I can afford to bring my children along with me, which means that I'm not, you know, And I can do this balance of podcasting in the morning or in the evening when they're asleep and doing the right. The whole of Twist was written over the shoulder of my infant while I was breastfeeding.

55:40Yeah. Like that's in the middle of the night at 3 o 'clock in the morning. I was going to ask you. I would either listen to Jack Reacher or I would. Yeah. I was going to ask you how you wrote it. If, if you, it seemed like you weren't workshopping that stuff on stage. Right. So this was like, you were just like writing it. And then were you, did you practice it? I did it in Melbourne badly at the Melbourne comedy festival. I was just like, I'm just going to, I'm going to hit Melbourne, Melbourne under, under prepared and it's going to be a trial by fire. And I'm going to have a slightly longer preview, you know, half price tickets so that I'm not feeling like I, which is sort of, that's a really hard thing to do to comedy.

56:28You have to kind of get good by failing and just being like, okay, I don't have three months to run this show in. I've got to do it in a week. I've got to pack in all the failure as quickly as I possibly can. And fuck, you know, the show has to be entertaining enough while it's failing that the audience feel like they've got what they came for. But for me it's very important that the show do what I want it to do, which is usually not just being funny. And so I was like, am I okay with it just being funny and chaotic for a week? Not really. Do I have any other options? No. So, for example, the ad sections there in the show, which we mentioned before, which are just three minutes of one-liners that I'm going to drop in every time the show sags so that the audience is getting some jokes every five to seven minutes.

57:23And then, of course, on the stage with the stuff that doesn't work, you inevitably every sentence or two find a laugh line because you've got your fucking survival instincts on the stage and then you go home and you put the audio into Rev.com because you can't stand to listen to your own voice and then you edit the text and then you go back in the next day and do it again. But yeah, that was a very, very painful process. Just, you know, just painful, you know. I couldn't, honestly, I mean, it kind of blew my mind because it's a great special. And I thought, and it feels, it does, it feels like a special.

58:05It feels like something that you have workshopped for years. you know, a lot, I don't have the same experience, but all the stuff from right side out is stuff that I have done in talks done in front of people for 10 years. Like it's stuff that, and I know that some of the best stuff came from stuff that I made up on the spot because I could see either the survival instinct or, or you can just read off how it should go when you're in person. And so once I realized like, you probably didn't do that for that. I was like, man, damn, that's, I can't, I don't even know how you did that. Um, yeah. So it's, well, by walking through the fire, that's the answer.

58:42It was that, um, to thinking, thinking of the metaphor that's, you know, Odin carving his eye out for knowledge, like, okay, there's a shortcut, but it's going to fucking hurt man. And, and I think, you know, for me, as I'm seeing like, uh, the, the, the focus of this episode for me, or what I'm taking away from this chat is this thing of, being all in in the season that you're in. You were talking about the obstacle is the way thing. Like you, I could easily, I could sit in the season I'm in right now and say, well, this is all the reasons I can't be happy is I can't do any of the things that I used to do.

59:18I don't, all the things that used to make me happy when I had to realize like, oh, what made me happy was doing what the season afforded me. And the same goes for, you know, developing that special. You couldn't do it the way that you used to do it. So you figured out a different way of doing it. and it produced a different type of special. Well, and doing the thing that is appropriate to the season is like, you know, like seasonal vegetables, the thing that is ripe right now. You eat the thing that's ripe right now. And you see so many, I'm going to say men particularly, who hit their 40s, hit their midlife crisis and go, I want to do the things I used to be allowed to do.

59:58I'm not allowed to do those things anymore. They used to make me happy. And then they fuck their lives down the shitter. Sorry. to be crude. And then they go and do those things and it's pathetic and it doesn't make them happy. And because they're not the same person, you can't, you can't be the same person that you were. That's like saying, you know, all that will make me happy is being able to like shit my pants. Like when I was a baby, like that's, don't be, don't be stupid. You're not the same person that you were. Like, even if that was a really fun thing to do when you were eight months old, I guarantee you it'll be a different thrill now.

1:00:35As you're saying it, it's like, duh, what the heck? How do you not know this? But it took me at least, I mean, I didn't have to go do that. I didn't have to spend years of my life doing that. So that to my credit, I didn't do that. But I did write it all out and thought, you know, like I can be in a depressive state and walk downstairs and see my 12 year old son doing perler beads and be like, yes, this is awesome. I love this. And it's, and it's like, and I, and I think part of this, I couldn't imagine myself being that dad. Like I couldn't imagine that being like, I don't know why, but my, but my point is, cause I started thinking about why does this matter to somebody as a creator who is 22?

1:01:22I think that's what I was trying to get at is what matters about it is take advantage of that season, regardless of the obstacles and regardless of the opportunities. Because when I was 22, I was thinking, well, I wish I had a book deal. I wish I had this thing. I wish I had. Now I have some of those things, but I don't have what I had when I was 22. too. Maybe, yeah, I don't know. For some reason, it's just, it's working on me now, mainly because I didn't know that I'd be such a different person at 38. It's this thing where I think we are robbed by the fact that people who are happy in their middle and older years don't have the urge to talk about it in the way that people who are happy in their 20s are.

1:02:09So like when you're happy, you're so showy, like you're performing selfhood so hard at that age because you're trying to figure out who you are and you're asking everyone, is this an okay person to be? And you kind of that kind of so youthful joy looks bigger and glitzier and more exciting. And so culture focuses in on it's more photogenic. And then as you get older, you can be equally happy and satisfied, but you have less of an urge to show it off and tell people about it, as well as maybe the things that make you happy are quieter things. And as well as, you know, the fact that, you know, beauty is something more specific as you get older and it's more personal and it's less sort of universalisable.

1:02:55I think maybe the analogy is, you know, how young people who are beautiful are beautiful to everyone, but old people are beautiful, are usually mostly beautiful to the people who love them. And so the way to stay beautiful as you age is to have people love you, not to like get plastic surgery. Because getting plastic surgery is trying to be beautiful in the way that young people are beautiful. Right. Yeah. But if you're beautiful in the way that old people are beautiful, that's just making people love you. Right. Is that a thing? I don't think I've ever heard that. It's really good. I just made it up.

1:03:25Sorry. It's so good. Turn it into something. That is, I love that. And it's so true. Yeah. I wonder what it ought to be. But, yeah, we need to romanticize these different periods of life in a way that I think we heavily romanticize one period of life. But where can people find you online, Andy J Pizza Miller? Creative Pep Talk and AndyJPizza.com. What about you? Patreon.com slash Alice Fraser. That's a one-stop shop for all of my start-up specials, podcasts, blogs, my weekly Tea with Alice salons, where we sit in a room and have a chat like this or my twice-weekly writers' meetings. The expression of interest form is open for the Swiss retreat.

1:04:10I've got a book. I've got a book. It's called A Passion for Passion. It's available online at unbound.com. And we'll be in bookshops in the UK on the 6th of February and in the US on the 5th of May. Great. Awesome. This was a blast. I hope we get to do it again. I also feel like we could do six of these. Thank you so much. Yeah.

1:04:46absolutely massive thanks to alice for joining me on this episode go check out her specials highly recommend it i would start with the alice fraser trilogy and then work your way up to her latest special twist, which made me cry. It hit me in a bunch of different ways and made me laugh out loud, even though I was watching it alone. Really, really recommend it. She's extremely talented at what she does and very poignant thinker and very funny comic. I told you I'd be back with the CTA. The call to adventure today is midlife lysis. If you're not familiar with this word, lysis, this is a play on midlife crisis.

1:05:34Lysis is a word that they use a lot in dream interpretation. And they talk about the lysis of the dream, which is kind of the transformation that happens in the dream, the moment in the dream where everything changes and there's a kind of resolution. And I was thinking about how I don't want to have a midlife crisis, but I do want to have a midlife lysis. And I'm having one, whether I like it or not, which is halfway through this life, I'm just having this moment where I'm not the person that I used to be. So I'm in a place in my life that I never saw coming. And it's changed my relationship to my creativity.

1:06:13And instead of trying to go back and cling to the good things that my creative practice used to be or what it used to mean to me, I'm trying to acknowledge the things that are great and unique about where I'm at now. So while back in the day, it used to be so motivating to me to figure out a goal and work my way towards it and look at the progress and let that really fuel my tank. These days, I'm much more motivated by just the work itself and the goals within the creativity of what I'm trying to achieve and just trying to do another, crack another story, break another story or analogy or metaphor or illustration.

1:06:58And I'm trying to learn how to live into the life, the creative life that's possible if I will accept certain creative deaths in my journey. And so that's my creative call to adventure for you today is to think about, you know, what are maybe some of the things that you are desperately clinging to because they used to give you so much life, but now there's just not a lot of life left in those parts of your practice and allow yourself to evolve, allow yourself to take joy in what's bringing you joy in your creativity today. Even if that means taking on a different title or letting go of an old title or something that you just thought would always be true.

1:07:39It just occurred to me that this is something that Sophie Miller, my wife, talked about in her creative mornings talk, which I don't know if it's live or not, but there will be a recording of that. And she talks about this in thinking that she would always be this particular type of artist and letting go of that. And that's really inspiring to me too. Massive thanks to Sophie for supporting the show, being an editor and producer on the show. huge thanks to Connor Jones for the audio editing and video editing and sound design of the show huge thanks to Yoni Wolf and the band Y for our theme music and soundtrack and thanks to you for listening I hope you really enjoyed it and until we speak again stay pepped up

1:08:48Hello, this is Jack Wilson, the host of the History of Literature podcast. For the past 10 years, I've been talking to novelists, biographers, and scholars about the greatest books in the history of the world and the men and women who wrote them. Like our recent episodes on Dante and Love, a starter pack of 10 Indian classics, the pop culture that influenced Sylvia Plath, and a talk with scientist and novelist Alan Lightman about the wonders of nature. Join us at the History of Literature podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, the podcast is over, so I don't know why you're still listening, but I am glad that you enjoyed it enough to stick to the end.

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