It’s been the ages-old belief that first impressions are everything. In the case of Liz Glazer, that couldn’t ring any truer, and she’s taking the opportunity to employee her bluntly honest approach to comedy to dissect some tough subjects — and she’s hoping it helps others along the way.
Embedded at the core of her debut stand-up album, A Very Particular Experience, which was unleashed into the world on May 12 via Blonde Medicine, the former attorney and Boston Comedy Festival champion tells the story on the one-year anniversary of the stillbirth of her daughter of just that — a very particular experience in which she continued to grieve an unspeakable loss, while still processing the grief associated with the loss of her father and her cat, Mona. Within the hour, Glazer employs her dangerously sharp joke writing while offering up advice and solace for those who have dealt with the same type of situation, by unpacking the big and small details of her grieving process, and many of the thoughts that came along with it, both humorous and deep.
Vanyaland recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Glazer to discuss the album, the natural catharsis that came about during its creation, and how she hopes the material, both from a comedic and personal standpoint, can help people grieving similarly through their own hardships. Check it out.
Jason Greenough: Getting started, the reason why we’re here is your debut comedy album, A Very Particular Experience. With everything that went into this hour, what’s the overall feeling as this material makes its way into the world on a grander scale?
Liz Glazer: I am excited for people to hear it. I feel very proud of it, both as a work of great emotional weight, and in terms of feeling proud of the throughline of it. I’m excited that I was able to put together a lot of things about myself and my comedy in a way where I was able to talk about a hard experience, and still be funny and genuine while not shying away from the hard things, but also saying the funny things. I feel like it encapsulates me at this moment really well. I want people to meet me. I want to be seen and understood like everybody else, and it’s exciting to have made, along with the people who helped make it, a work that really does that upon listening to it.”
Right on. Like you said, this batch of material really covers an awful lot of details within a very deep, personal, and in a lot of ways, dark topic. Now, not necessarily in terms of delivery, but was it tough for you to take the experiences you detail here in this hour and not only make it funny, but also make it palatable for your audience? Was there any sort of hesitancy to open up about these experiences and this tragedy that really isn’t easy to come back from?
I don’t think there was a real hesitancy around that, because I knew that I had to talk about it to survive it. Where I do think there were moments within the year-long journey from it happening to recording about it, there were moments when I needed to work on some of the jokes, and it’s one thing to not have a joke go well, but I think when that joke is about your stillborn child, there’s something that would make you feel like you’re a terrible person because this joke didn’t go well. It would just be another layer of guilt and shame around doing it, but I also realized that I have to do that in order to get to a version of the joke that won’t make me or the audience feel that way about it.
Now, within that creative process taking over in just trying to talk about the experience of stillbirth, did that offer a catharsis in that moment as you tried to work through it as a creative piece?
I really think so. The catharsis really happened in putting the entire hour together. At the very meaning of the word ‘catharsis,’ it has to come from a deep process in order to have a kosher catharsis. One that the Greeks would approve of. I think, in order to do that, it wasn’t as simple as me sharing about this thing and so now it’s done, it was more of the process of putting together pieces about grieving my father and our cat Mona in order to get some particularity around the kind of grief that is so confusing that I think pregnancy loss brings. I lost my dad, and I wanted to talk about that, as well, but in this piece, the material about my dad served as a point of contrast in order to then understand that there is grief of the loss of a seventy-three year old man, which is sad, but when you’re grieving that person, you’re grieving them because of qualities within them that you miss. Presumably. At least that’s the stuff I think about when I think about my dad. I think about stuff that happened with him when he was alive, where as the confusing thing about our daughter Leo, and grieving her loss is that she was never alive, does that mean she didn’t exist? That doesn’t feel quite right, which I think is the nub of what is so confusing, but also unspeakable about stillbirth and grief that surrounds stillbirth, because there’s that feeling of ‘what are you even missing?’ but it’s confusing because your sad and you’re grief-stricken and shocked.
I don’t really take a position on the grief olympics in terms of if one loss is greater than another, and I don’t think it’s an inquiry worth engaging in, frankly, but there is a n argument that losing a baby in this way is ‘worse,’ because this is a moment that you expect to be the happiest moment of your life, or at least that’s the way childbirth is advertised. Then it’s this unexpectedly sad moment, so the delta between the expectation or happiness and the reality of sadness, that can be a measure of how bad a loss is. It kind of begs this question of what is bad about losing people, or pets for that matter.
Basically, the catharsis was recognizing elements from my lived experiences that I had things to say about, with arcs and punchlines to incorporate, then putting them together to make a case about something I learned about love in living through this experience.
With this not being the originally planned hour for your debut album, as you express at the top of the material, how do you feel this slate of comedy represents your creative process in terms of it being an introduction to your work, who you are as an artist, and the work you’ve put in up to this point in your career?
That’s a good question. I think there is an interesting way to look at that, and I’ll start by answering about somebody else.
I first encountered Tig Notaro through her Live set, which now knowing more about her work, it’s like, really different from the type of work she was doing at that time, which is something she says in that set. And even though she says it in that set, that was my first introduction to her and it wasn’t like the other stuff that I went and listened to was unrecognizable. I could tell it was coming from the same person, and I think it’s similar to how you meet someone at a specifically vulnerable time because something just happened or whatever it might be, and they wind up sharing something that isn’t necessarily an over-share, but it makes sense as to why they would be sharing that with you at that moment, and I’ve found that, at least in most situations, that is a great introduction to someone even if the next ten times I see that person, it isn’t what they’re talking about.
I think perhaps similarly, for people whose introduction to me is this hour, I don’t think that every time I do stand-up that it’s the same as this. In many ways it’s not. At the same time, though, it’s totally me and it is a very particular experience, but some of those jokes are jokes that I’ve told for years at this point, but I think it’s very clear that I was doing a ‘thing’ in this hour. I like that as an introduction, because for my taste in consuming art, I would way rather consume something that someone had to do or say and then watch older sets that they did in a five-minute showcase, and that can have a different type of worth, but I got to know them in this other, more intimate way first, and I think that would be a preference.
With that intimate nature of this hour, there is that connection that you’re bound to have with people, if not with your creative approach, you could also be connecting with people who may have dealt with this type of situation, or even people who haven’t but know someone who has and may not know the whole scope of what that experience entails. At the end of the day, that’s pretty powerful as compared to having your introduction be fifteen minutes of dick jokes or something.
Right, but that’s the next hour. [laughs]
I mean, I look forward to that one too, for sure.
Something else I was going to say, and I make jokes to this effect on the album, is that I love surveillance. Like, I don’t make this joke on the album, and it’s not really even a joke I make on stage, but I don’t like reality TV. However, I would watch security camera footage of anyone doing anything, as long as it’s just someone being surveilled. Like the original Real World, where it was just raw big brother vibes. Similarly, this hour, even though there are literal jokes about surveillance, but i just mean them as a ‘by the way’ or meta reference to this moment, this is almost a private conversation I had with one hundred-fifty people in a room, and people who are now listening to it are having access to that kind of intimacy. Am I the same in every situation that isn’t in front of those 150 people in that room on that night, that was the one-year anniversary of my daughter’s stillbirth? No, and I think I’m recognizably the same. My soul is the same.
Also, in other situations, it might be a little different to experience the comedy that I would do because it’s not that day, it doesn’t carry that heaviness to it, and I think elements of my style and my writing might be the same, but the material is almost definitely going to be different. The other thing is that it does derive from my life.
Unfortunately, life includes death, and we can learn, I believe, from processing loss and death. So this is an effort on my part to do that publicly, so as to be the vessel through which that set of feelings can come out for people to perhaps enjoy and learn from, and to laugh at in moments. My other comedy also comes from my life, but not all of my life are those moments, thankfully.
You answered my follow-up question already.
I’m very efficient. [laughs]
With all of that being said, although these moments and the traumas you talk about in this album are very personal, like we talked about before, there are so many that have dealt with their own thing like this in their own way. What do you hope this album provides for listeners, and not just for listeners who can relate, but also the listeners who may not have known what goes underneath the surface of this type of situation?
I do believe that learning about other types of sadness and loss can enrich us in our human experience of being alive. To go back to Tig’s hour, and other hours where sad stuff happens, where I might not have known about what kind of possibility. I’ve laughed and I’ve also learned. Like, I take a probiotic with an antibiotic every single time because of a line in Tig’s set that wasn’t even a laugh line. If somebody takes from this hour that they may not have known the possibilities of stillbirth or the prevalence of pregnancy loss, or god forbid something afflicts them or someone they know and they’re wondering what to say, or if somebody is afflicted with the kind of grief and worry as I did that they might never be able to laugh again, I think this hour would be a good indication that they could be just fine.
Is there any other aspect of this album that you may want to touch on before we get out of here?
I think the element of processing loss sometimes is looked at as this kind of luxury. You take time off to do it, and you can question whether you have to do it. I think part of the reason why people don’t say they’re pregnant right away is really for the protection of other people, because god forbid something happens to the pregnancy and everyone has to feel bad, whereas if you don’t say anything, it’s just the pregnant person who deals with this alone. I don’t know that my album is going to stop that, but I think that more people talking about loss that is unspeakable provides an avenue for people to talk about things rather than to feel alone with those things. Now, there is so much talk about getting help, and god forbid if someone takes their own life, there’s the thought of ‘could we have done something?’ and these are the ways. This is the sort of 3.0 way that people are intervening, where it’s like ‘what are things that people aren’t talking about that they could reach out?’
I don’t know if my doing so is going to be that for someone, but it could be. The other thing is that stillbirths are as prevalent as they are in part because anti-abortion activists are lobbying to limit the research that could help prevent them. That’s part of the reason they exist as much as they do in the United States. So, if contending with the human experience, the reality that somebody is grieving is a way of raising awareness around stillbirth prevention, I feel that my job is done.