'After I realized I didn’t want kids, I would remind [my mother] from time to time when it felt relevant, like in the middle of a long phone call or milling around the Nordstrom shoe department,” Alison Leiby ’06 recalls in her new memoir. “You know, the prime times to drop on your parents that they’ll never become grandparents.”
That anecdote—a serious topic dispatched with the comedian’s signature wry humor—offers a taste of the tone of Leiby’s book, I’m a Lot: Surviving Myself and All the People I’ve Been.
“In writing it, I learned a lot about my relationship to who I am,” says the Arts & Sciences alum. “It’s a love letter to all the terrible aspects of my personality. You’re allowed to not be perfect or good. You can give yourself a little bit more grace. Yeah, I was a mess in my twenties, but that’s fine; it’s what your twenties are for.”
In the collection of 14 essays—which Harper’s Bazaar calls a “laugh-out-loud treatise on what it truly means to embrace every part of yourself”—Leiby contemplates such issues as coping with chronic pain and opting for an abortion, along with more lighthearted topics, like playing sports, being a cat mom, and obsessing over the “Real Housewives” shows.
Sreang Hok/Cornell University
Full Teaching Professor Brenda Schertz, coordinator of the ASL/Deaf Studies Program in Arts & Sciences’ linguistics department, teaches in Morrill Hall
