"Nanette" is basically "Eat Pray Love" for autistic queer folk

 

Personally, I would say that if you care more about the effect of your words than you do about the meaning behind them, then you have a recklessly Machiavellian worldview. Laughter is rarely benign, but it is often malicious.
(p. 21*)

But to be clear, I did not create Nanette with a Netflix special in mind. I didn’t even have a deal in place when we filmed it, and the only reason Nanette became a Netflix phenomenon was because she had already inadvertently become a phenomenon on her own.
(p. 23*)

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. But I am a late-blooming type, so I took to it all very well.
(p. 27*)

I am way better at fat jokes than anybody who thinks they’re funny.
“I’ve always been very thick of the thigh. I once scalped a girl playing leapfrog.”
See? Fat jokes were my bread and butter, which is a shame, because that kind of bread and butter is basically a shame sandwich, and shame is never part of a healthy, balanced diet.
(p. 190*)

They say that comedy is trauma plus time. But I have never needed time. I have always written my stories for laughs at the same time as the humiliation is tearing my self-esteem to shreds. This is my gift.
(p. 193*)

That story has been told a million times. And in any case, I doubt you’d be very interested, because neither cocaine nor people under its influence are at all interesting. It doesn’t matter how fast you talk; boring will always be boring.
(p. 213*)

Nanette is basically Eat Pray Love for autistic queer folk
(p. 299*)

*    *    *    *    *

I loved the idea of “multiculturalism,” because it made sense to me. I’d always struggled to feel as if I belonged, and so I thought that everyone should be made to feel welcome—because by this logic, then I would be welcome too. Who said selfishness can’t lead to human rights advocacy?
(p. 68*)
 

Sounds have always had the ability to make me feel things: audible chewing elicits anger, loud noises can bring on sudden anxiety, and high-pitched sounds resonate in my spine with something akin to physical pain. It’s not all bad. A satisfying key change in a song brings on all the sensations of cresting on a roller coaster, but stripped of the terror. It’s lovely. But a lot of noises all at once, even if they are exclusively pleasant sounds, will always feel like an assault.
(p. 102*)

This was how I had always approached my social anxiety. Heading into any kind of new situation, I’d run through all the scenarios I was able to imagine and then prepare my responses ahead of time. The older I got and the more experience I gathered, the more complex the situations I was able to imagine and the better I got at responding. But below the surface, my brain was always doing intense levels of manual labor, the duck legs of my thinking whirring through the Rolodex of possibilities I had prepared earlier. It was as exhausting as it was distressing. No wonder I was burnt out by fifteen.
(p. 103*)
 

As the social networks at school became more and more complex, I found it impossible to make the jump from friendliness to being a friend. I understood that I had a rich inner life, and I swam in it as often as I was able. I assumed everyone around me also had a rich inner life, but I was at a loss as to how to connect my world to theirs. I thought I was doing all the right things, the same things as everyone else, but I was always made to feel odd, apart from the crowd. What I didn’t (couldn’t) see were all the rivers of intuitive connections that other people make with each other.
(pp. 103-104*)
 

Weston finished up his exchange program at the end of the second term and returned to Utah shortly after that. I was bereft. He was the only person whose life in Hobart I had attached my own to in any meaningful way, his rhythms of living were the only ones I had bothered to learn to read, and when he left, I experienced pain in my heart. One thing made it OK, and that was that Weston was also sad. Looking back, this is so clearly the kind of wonderful rite of passage that I had always wanted, but I didn’t recognise it at the time because I didn’t think being normal could hurt so much.
(p. 158*)
 

It doesn’t matter whether the compulsion to point out difference is malicious or good-natured, it will always hurt to be reminded that you don’t belong to the only world you’ve ever known.
(p. 179*)
 

I want to be able to fold my ASD [Autism spectrum disorder] and ADHD [Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder] into the rest of the mess that is me, but as the myths are so firmly embedded into popular (mis)understanding, I don’t have the luxury to skip over them. It is just a sad reality that I have to waste even more of my time to bring many of you up to speed.
(p. 226*)

My experience did not match the popular understanding of autism, and I knew I had to become an expert in neurobiology in order to untangle the myriad of myths surrounding autism—just to beg permission to claim that piece of my identity.
I was right to be cautious, because when I finally did start telling the world of my diagnosis, the dismissals came thick and fast. I was told that I was too fat to be autistic. I was told that I was too social to be autistic. I was told that I was too empathetic to be autistic. I was told I was too female to be autistic. I was told I wasn’t autistic enough to be autistic. Nobody who refused me my diagnosis ever considered how painful it might have been for me, and it got real boring real fast.
(p. 229*)

Since making my diagnosis public, I have had some parents of nonverbal folk take me to task for identifying as autistic while not being as “disabled” as their child. To those people, I would like to say, I get it. I understand your frustration. It is my bet that you are not supported well enough, and that I seem like a good person to vent at. I don’t mind. I can take it. But if it helps, it is not my intention to take anything away from you or your experience. All I want to do is help create something of a window into the inner workings of a manually processing brain. You know as well as I do that no two experiences are the same on the so-called spectrum; but I do know something of how frustrating and painfully lonely it can be from the inside. Ultimately, we are on the same team.
(pp. 230-231*)

I wish more than anything that I had known about my ASD when I was a kid, just so I could’ve learnt how to look after my own distress, instead of assuming my pain was normal and deserved. There is no one to blame, but I still grieve for the quality of life I lost because I didn’t have this key piece to my human puzzle.
(p. 233*)

Please, stop expecting people with autism to be exceptional. It is a basic human right to have average abilities.
(p. 235*)

Being perpetually potentially unsafe is a great recipe for anxiety. And, spoiler alert, anxiety is bad. But if anxiety in a child is left untreated—or worse, unacknowledged—anxiety will not only be magnified, it will inevitably compound into trauma. But it is very difficult to explain to a world that has decided Disneyland is the happiest place on earth that a child’s birthday party can trigger a fight-or-flight response in someone with ASD. All you see is a good time that must be had, but inside me it feels like a war zone. Two scoops of PTSD [Post traumatic syndrom disorder] for everybody! Happy fucking birthday.
(p. 236*)
 

We need to stop romanticising mental illness as a pathway to artistic greatness. Mental illness is not a romance—a ticket to genius—it is excruciatingly isolating. It is a ticket to fucking nowhere. (Nanette: Brisbane Edit)
(p. 298*)

 

*    *    *    *    *

During the early stages of writing this memoir I began asking a lot of questions about what I was like when I was a little kid, but each time I broached the subject she would respond in a way that suggested she didn’t think it was any of my business who I am. “Why do you need to know that?” she’d retort, as shocked and defensively as if I’d enquired about her post-menopausal habits of masturbation. The closest I ever got to an answer was a list of the defining traits of my siblings; Justin was the loving one, Jessica was the leader, Ben was the most intelligent, and Hamish was the funny one. This was likely just an attempt to encourage me to be more interested in other people, but I’m more inclined to believe she meant it as an inventory of qualities that do not apply to me.
(p. 28*)

As much as I wanted to and as hard as I tried, I couldn’t stop crying—I had seen too much, I had seen my kneecap and, for the first time in my life, I saw that Mum was not in control of the world around me. I saw that she knew this and that it frightened her, and so it frightened me.
(p. 59*)

When I was a kid, I used to feel sorry for Dad. We all did; and sadly, Mum knew this and that must have been painful. Dad’s preference for fence-sitting has been a near-constant source of frustration for Mum. As a child I couldn’t at all comprehend why, but now, as an adult, I can see the immense pressure she must have been under. Essentially, when it came to emotional labor and decision-making, Mum was operating as a single mother of six (five children and one adult man). But whenever things went wrong, which they frequently did, Mum would suddenly be married again and having the anatomy of her mistakes explained back to her by the very man who’d refused to help in the first place.
(p. 60-61*)

Out of all the humans on earth, I love my mum the most fiercely. This will be a bit shit for my spouse lady to read, but I will remind her here that she is definitely number two and that Mum is 78 years old and there is a succession plan in place.
(p. 62*)

Before I moved to Hobart, I honestly believed that the elderly were the only people who could possibly enjoy my company, and even then I worried it was only because they were lonely and I was better than a chair. But at university I discovered that I was likeable to people my own age. Not all of them by a long shot, but enough of a handful that by the end of the first term I had carved out something of a social life, intermittent as it was. I had by no means transformed into a social butterfly, but I did uncover my latent talent for drinking.
I had my first drink when I was twelve, just after I took up smoking, and two years before I saw my first sex scene, for context. I’d found an old bottle of Galliano in Pop’s shed one afternoon, a tall, elegant bottle that had three inches of yellow liquid I liked the look of because I had not yet pissed in a cup. Galliano is not supposed to be thick like jelly, nor is it supposed to taste like the inside of a dead man’s arse, but that’s what I got. So, I didn’t drink another drop of alcohol until my eighteenth birthday.
(p. 151*)
 

One of the biggest faults I built into my coming out narrative was that I blamed my mum for my pain. I thought she was responsible for what I had to endure. But I’d been so self-absorbed that I’d never been able to believe anyone else got hurt. I took the lion’s share of the brunt, sure, but my family were not the architects of my position in life. I’m only now beginning to appreciate the complicated nature of this kind of fracture: it doesn’t matter which side you’re on, you still get hurt. But I was too naive at the time to understand that my mum had not rejected me. She had been afraid. She was afraid because she couldn’t control the world for me, and it frightened her. And it frightened me.
(p. 270*)

 

*    *    *    *    *

The truth at the heart of my success was that there were barely enough girls playing golf in Tasmania to make up a team at the time. The dearth of talent was such that it was almost guaranteed that any girl under the age of eighteen caught holding a stick within a ten-mile radius of a golf course was going to be selected, and I’m not even sure that it mattered what kind of stick.
(p. 92*)

 

[...] whenever I felt as if I had any kind of knowledge, I was inclined to share it, whereas natural women rarely seemed to want to do the knowing of things out loud. They could be so smart, charming and funny then lose it all as soon as they hit the orbit of larger groups and/or boys. It was confusing to me. I decided that if ever I stumbled into the ability to be smart, charming and funny I would never turn it off. Not for anyone.
(p. 93*)

Thankfully, despite my lack of ladylike qualities, it didn’t take me long to work out that in order to be a “lady” in the world of teenage girl golfing, all I had to do was not be a “slut.” So, given that I was shy, deeply closeted, fat, had selective mutism and undiagnosed autism, I was never going to be caught straying very far from “appropriate” behaviour.
(p. 95*)

In his statement to the press, Gibbs [Richard Gibbs, leader of anti-homosexual group TAS-Alert] proclaimed that it was “natural” to feel “repulsed” by homosexuality before declaring that it was time “for homophobics to come out of the closet.” It is always offensive when victim status is claimed by the very people who are actively advocating for legal limitations on the human rights of a marginalised and vulnerable group within their community. But the vileness of this tactic goes through the roof when they do so by co-opting the vernacular of the very group they are so proud to hate and oppress, legally or otherwise. How can “all lives” possibly “matter” in a world where people just keep doing this kind of horrific shit?
(p. 107*)
 

I remember hearing an old bloke at the golf club saying that “AIDS was cancer for faggots and they all deserved to die,” and I remember the only thing that I took issue with was the fact that cancer was not a virus.
(p. 108*)

 

Unlike the slab-a-thon, the Pale Ale Challenge was impossible to win, because it was essentially a ruse. Here’s how it went—you pay a door charge and get the pale ale challenge T-shirt, which was cheap, white and always at least one size smaller than the one you asked for. You put the T-shirt on and go to the bar, you ask for a pale ale and, after you pay, the barkeep will press a happy-face stamp in the first of the twenty-five squares printed on the front of your T-shirt. If you can drink twenty pale ales, you get the last five pale ales for free! Which is great, because you absolutely will not want them.
Given that I haven’t been able to look sideways at a pale ale since that fateful evening, it’s fair to say that as a promotional strategy, the Pale Ale Challenge was not playing the long game. But in terms of giving one man with a stamp a chance to fondle the breasts of scores of young women every time they bought a beer, then the Pale Ale Challenge was nothing short of genius.
(p. 151*)

 

*    *    *    *    *

 

The day I finally got the courage to walk inside my first-ever art gallery, I was met with the closest thing to heaven I could imagine.
It was as quiet as a library, but, unlike books, art needed to live in conditions that suited my constitution wonderfully. The air flowed freely, the lighting was calming, and I could sit alone and not have to pretend to do anything. I was allowed to do what came naturally to me, to sit quietly and observe.
(p. 122*)
 

Halfway through the first term, I was given my own corner of one of the painting studios, which gave me somewhere to hide from everyone, which I was very grateful for. And I began spending much of my final year at school sitting in a darkened studio producing muddy compositions filled with tortured figures. I was a terrible artist, but I did have a terrific talent for spinning interpretive significance to explain my lack of actual skill. In other words, I was a budding conceptual bullshit artist.
(p. 127*)
 

Fauvism is what you get if you take Post-Impressionism and put it on Expressionist steroids through a Technicolor lens.
(p. 128*)
 

I continued my lunchtime visits to the gallery, but I stopped asking the usual questions, I stopped trying to contextualise the paintings within broader histories and just stared at them, trying my best to feel something, hoping my hardest to be filled with some kind of emotional resonance. The closest I got was feeling frustrated by my lack of appropriate feelings.
(p. 129*)
 

Painted around 1906, it [Les demoiselles d'Avignon] shattered both the beauty and pictorial norms of the day and is the work most often cited as the beginning of modern art, which, if you are unclear on that as a concept, is the art that tends to look like your kid could do it, but your kid couldn’t do it and your kid didn’t do it, so it’s probably best if you let go of that cliché and just think about how it makes you feel.
(p. 129*)

*according to my reader

Hannah Gadsby - Ten Steps to Nanette (Atlantic / Allen & Unwin, 2022)