Ten Steps to Nanette
A Memoir Situation
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4.8 • 9 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Multi-award-winning Hannah Gadsby broke comedy with their show Nanette. In this “enthralling” (The Washington Post) memoir, they take us through the defining moments in their life and their powerful decision to tell the truth—no matter the cost.
Don’t miss Hannah Gadsby’s Something Special, now streaming!
“Hannah is a Promethean force, a revolutionary talent. This hilarious, touching, and sometimes tragic book is all about where their fires were lit.”—Emma Thompson
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: PopSugar, Vulture
“There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself,” Hannah Gadsby declared in their show Nanette, a scorching critique of the way society conducts public debates about marginalized communities.
Gadsby grew up as the youngest of five children in Tasmania, where homosexuality was illegal until 1997. After moving to mainland Australia and receiving a degree in art history, they found themselves adrift, working itinerant jobs and enduring years of isolation punctuated by homophobic and sexual violence. When Gadsby was twenty-seven, a friend encouraged them to enter a stand-up competition. They won, and so began their career in comedy.
Gadsby became well known for their self-disparaging humor, but in 2015, as Australia debated the legality of same-sex marriage, they started to question this mode of storytelling, beginning to work on a show that would transform their career and would become “the most-talked-about, written-about, shared-about comedy act in years” (The New York Times).
Harrowing and hilarious, Ten Steps to Nanette traces Gadsby’s growth as a queer person, their ever-evolving relationship with comedy, and their struggle with late-in-life diagnoses of autism and ADHD, finally arriving at the backbone of Nanette: the renouncement of self-deprecation, the rejection of misogyny, and the moral significance of truth-telling.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this stunning debut, Emmy Award–winning comedian Gadsby guides readers on a tour of her life that's every bit as intimate, gutting, and untidy as the performance referenced in the title. Decades before international audiences met her through her 2018 Netflix comedy special, Nanette, Gadsby was a Tasmanian girl alienated from her peers in the '80s by her autism, ADHD, and burgeoning lesbian identity—none of which, she reveals, she understood until she was much older. Though heavily affected by sexual abuse and rape in her youth and young adulthood that led to multiple misdiagnoses ("borderline personality disorder, bipolar, irritable bowel syndrome, too much fat, etc."), Gadsby resists centering her abusers, instead offering a candid, often bawdy account of her nonlinear path toward healing—shaped by a gauntlet of therapists, a career in "mak a joke out of" her mental health, and her loving yet complex relationship with her family. To discourage readers from "fall into the trap of playing truth detective," she eschews cohesive timelines and, in doing so, vividly evokes the "disorientation" of living with trauma. Meanwhile, humorous asides are scattered throughout by way of Terry Pratchett–esque footnotes—"Seriously... I am triggering all of the warnings." This stirring tale of resilience laughs in the face of the "inspiration porn" industry.
Customer Reviews
Absolutely empowering
I am just finished Nanette and I’m going back to the beginning to start again … it is captivating, empowering, thought-provoking and absolutely FABULOUS.
Hannah’s story empowers marginalized groups from lesbians to people with ASD & ADHD to ‘ME TOO’ to women and the misogynistic world we navigate to the trans & non binary community & mostly those who have suffered trauma.
Nanette offers a feminist perspective on comedy and the world at large on a profound level.
Hannah you are my hero