'I have this feeling that I missed the day in school where they explained how to live your life." Maeve Higgins is on the phone talking about her new book, Off You Go, a follow-up to the brilliant collection of essays We Have A Good Time, Don't We?. Among the tales of moving from place to place, Off You Go perfectly captures the "what am I going to do now?" ennui of one's early 30s; hilarious and poignant, panicked and winning.
Higgins, from Cobh, now lives in (spoiler) New York. It has been a hot and sticky summer, but now autumn is ready. The colours of autumn suit her better, she thinks. And the long coats.
“I’m dog-sitting my friend’s dog at the moment and I took him to the park this morning and it was just perfect. The right temperature, you know, just A Girl Walking Her Dog in the City. Whereas I hadn’t been leaving my apartment. I’ve just been sweating and writing.”
The sweating and the writing is paying off. Higgins found success in Ireland in her 20s. Now she performs regularly in her new home, and hosts a monthly show in Union Hall in Brooklyn with Jon Ronson called I'm New Here – Can You Show Me Around? She has appeared on Inside Amy Schumer and more frequently on the National Geographic Channel's StarTalk talk show, a spin-off of the podcast of the same name presented by Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
I feel a strong twinge of Collective Feminist Vindication Syndrome learning that Higgins is doing well in comedy’s most crucial city. My friend Etain brought sandwiches over to my house the other afternoon for lunch and I told her I had interviewed Higgins the day before.
"Oh my God," she said, with the kind of crazed look that means I could never introduce her to Maeve Higgins were the possibility ever to arise, which it probably wouldn't. "I love her," Etain sighed. We talked how good her stand-up is, and her erstwhile RTÉ series Fancy Vittles. "That's why I fangirl over her stuff," said Etain. "Because she's so intelligent. I'll be thinking about one of her jokes five hours later like 'that's so funny and so sad and relevant to me'." We laughed at that because it sounds weird but it's also true. Higgins' perfect pacing, her excavation of awkwardness, the tangential surrealism and kindness of her work means you don't so much guffaw at her gags, but splutter, and then digest them. Beginning stand-up at 24, Higgins was on a track. Do this festival, do this show, do this television series, and now go to England and to Australia. She was in a privileged position and she knew it.
Before she hit 30, she had already achieved a lot. But then, and she can’t quite put her finger on when it started, she began . . . wondering. “It just set in a bit. It was almost like my teens. This feeling of: but wait, what am I doing? What should I be doing? What’s the best way to use my life?”
She tries to answer those questions by talking about them on stage and writing them down. Often, that’s the only way she even knows what she thinks because she hears herself saying it or sees herself writing it.
Leaving Ireland was important for her. Being alone is important. Being introspective – and she hopes this isn’t contradictory – as well meeting other people and finding out how they do ‘it’, is important too.
Being away from home means she can look back at her life and her country and her people one step removed, which is helpful. She plunged herself into situations while navigating the ‘what’s next’ question. Living on Bere Island. Moving to London. A silent meditation retreat. And then moving to New York. There, she continued to try things; subletting, SoulCycle.
In a way it’s not surprising that Higgins is steadily working away in the States. There is a depth and intelligence to her humour that creates an ideal breeding ground for surrealism and nuance. She is – along with Sharon Horgan and the Rubberbandits – amongst our most interesting voices in comedy.
Ireland, like most other places, has a glut of lads-shouting-clichés type comics who don’t have a lot to offer in terms of the global advancement of the art form. That’s okay. But there’s a moment in the book, when upon returning to Dublin to do a gig at the International Bar, Higgins overhears a comic and his wife on Wicklow Street laughing about a rumour she was waitressing in London.
Higgins describes him as “a middle-aged white man with a commercially successful line in ‘what are we like at all, at all’ comedy. I hope that doesn’t give him away”. Zing. The zing hides a sting though. She writes: “So what if I used to live in a beautiful house and have my own TV series and then all that fell away and now I live in a terrible flat with a mouse colony under the sink and the only gig I have is right back where I started?
“So what if I can’t afford to buy these fancy vegetables to make a teeny pot of privileged ratatouille? Yes, I’ve taken a waitressing job in a soulless hipster restaurant in Shoreditch. Yes, the owner does coke in the office and siphons my tips. So what? Since when did I care so much about success and status? Since I lost them, it seemed, and since others who note such things reminded me of that loss.”
As that might reveal, there's profundity between the gags in Off You Go. What is success anyway? "The thing is as well, making the album, writing the screenplay, that's all satisfying, but ultimately everyone's just going to be asking 'what's your next screenplay? What's the next album?' I think that treadmill, I think I was on that. And it doesn't really work. For me, achievements are identifying my feelings!"
It’s impossible to ignore the excellent comedy being made by women at the moment, with much of it seeping gloriously through a feminist filter. “I think there is definitely more space for women now,” Higgins says, “and I think a lot of that space is made by the ones who managed to get in there and wriggle some room for the rest of us. Take Amy Schumer, who is very recently a big success. She definitely looks out for other women and puts us in stuff, helps us get heard. Same with Tig [Notaro] . . . I do believe that if you can’t see it, you can’t be it. I think it’s really important to be out there doing your thing, and that in itself is feminism. Personally, I think it needs more action that that, but if you’re a woman doing a great job in pretty much anything, then great, thank you.”
Higgins' appearance on Inside Amy Schumer came about through knowing one of the writers, the comedian Jessi Klein, and meeting the producer Kevin Kane. The show's team keeps an eye on up-and-coming comics in New York. And now she's one of those.
Is there a sense of achievement or even vindication now that she’s doing her thing in New York? “Sometimes I have tiny victories where I don’t have to look at my phone to know which direction I’m going in.”
In Ireland, Higgins noticed one main difference between herself and male comics: money. “I see that my male peers in Ireland own homes and earn more money than I do. For a while I was like ‘oh, that’s because I don’t tour as much and I don’t release DVDs’. But there are bigger forces. There are always bigger forces, it’s not just the individual. So sure, because of sexism, my career is different to my male peers. I was always told that I was ‘niche’. That’s literally the feedback that I got, ‘too niche’. And I’d be like ‘fair enough, I guess my stuff is kind of weird’. But now I’m kind of like, ‘hmm, it’s not that weird!’ It may be different, but it’s just as good.”
Moving to New York has worked for her. “Here, people are curious about what I’ve got to say and they seem to be listening,” she says, wondering what would have happened if she stayed in Ireland. She thinks a lot of Irish artists find that. It’s a small country.
“I got support from some areas, but when it came to actually growing as a writer, it was hard. I can’t put all the blame on myself for that. That’s my tendency, to be like, ‘oh you didn’t push yourself enough’ and ‘why didn’t you do this?’ But I’m also like, ah here, it still is a patriarchal society, and my chosen profession as a stand-up is really male-dominated. So I’m not going to beat myself up too much . . . I think Irish people have a real romantic notion about New York. I did, and I still do, even though it’s roasting and there are cockroaches in my kitchen.”
London didn’t work. “I moved to London because it’s so close to Dublin and there’s a big history of Irish comics going over there and there is a big comedy industry over there. But I found it to be a clichéd-level of unfriendly, unwelcoming, difficult, lonely, all those things. And I joke about it – all those poor men who went over there to work on building sites and became alcoholics and were mortified to go home. Those poor men.
“But honestly, no wonder! And you can’t say that it’s English people – London is full of people from everywhere – but it’s a tough old city.”
It's aloneness rather than loneliness that surfaces again and again in Off You Go. "I actually think I'm naturally inclined to be on my own," Higgins says. "I never feel bored, probably because I'm so self-absorbed. The very odd time I'll feel actually lonely where I'll think 'what is this?' Maybe once every few months."
Maybe that introspection is really about reflecting and thinking things out, because there is a leanness and a honed nature to the writing in Off We Go, writing that's not afraid to try to make sense of the world by putting it on the page.
In the chapter The Judge Make Time (a Kendrick Lamar reference), she writes, “We dip and weave and convince ourselves that we have saved time here or spent too much time there, always feeling there is never enough time, and for what? It doesn’t matter. The light has faded and you’ve taken your chances or you haven’t.” Might as well take them so. Off you go.
Read an exclusive extract from Maeve Higgins's book Off You Go on Monday on the Life pages in The Irish Times
