“Can you say I wafted in looking stunning?” asks Lou Sanders, dissolving into laughter before she’s even finished her sentence. She is joking, of course – the comedian isn’t actually desperate for a hyperbolically awed 2000s glossy magazine-style depiction of herself in print. It’s just that airing the silliest, cringiest, most wildly conceited response to any given situation – always coupled with a self-effacing acknowledgment of the ridiculousness of what she’s saying – is Sanders’ stock in trade.
What really happens is that Sanders strides into the Groucho Club (admittedly, quite a 2000s glossy mag setting) dressed, I will say, in a very fetching lilac jumpsuit. She is late but doesn’t waste time with small talk. Before she’s even properly sat down, she launches into her list of worries: she is anxious she’ll be misquoted, or that something she tells me off the record will be accidentally printed. She then asks, out of nowhere, whether I’ve been crying. I haven’t, I say, suddenly paranoid that my mascara is halfway down my cheeks. “Oh,” she chuckles nervously. “Maybe I’m projecting.”
If that sounds a touch chaotic, well, welcome to Sanders’ world. Over the past decade, the Kent native has established herself as one of the more unpredictable figures in British comedy. Her mock-egocentric, relentlessly giddy (yes, she does laugh at her own jokes; it’s part of her charm) and bracingly frank persona has lit up the standup circuit, as well as pretty much every comic parlour gameshow going. In 2019 she appeared on Taskmaster – a milestone for any rising comic – and won. More recently, she has been co-presenting Mel Giedroyc: Unforgivable, which sees a celebrity panel relate shameful stories from their pasts in an attempt to convince the hosts that they are the most morally dubious guest.
Recently, Sanders has been sharing some eye-watering tales of her own. In August, her moving, hilarious and generally astonishing memoir, What’s That Lady Doing? False Starts and Happy Endings, was released to surprisingly little fanfare (“We’ve been light on the promo. Thank God you’re here!” she guffaws). In it, she chronicles her traumatic early experiences with clarity, compassion and a non-stop stream of outrageous, distinctively Sanders-esque jokes, transferring her daffy standup persona to the page.
The book moves chronologically through Sanders’ life, from feeling unwanted as a child to an adolescence defined by heavy drinking and scarred by sexual assault. The booze-abetted escapades – some enjoyably wild, some horrifying – continue into her 20s and 30s, until her binge-drinking starts to sabotage her attempts to make it as a comedian (a career she came to relatively late, having worked in TV for more than a decade beforehand). Finally, she gets sober, gets help and becomes a successful standup.
That happy ending isn’t completely straightforward, however. Sanders begins the book by worrying how her family will respond to her description of her childhood, and you can see why: contact with her father is minimal, while her treatment at the hands of her late stepdad – who insulted her and lied to others about her behaviour – meant she ended up moving out of the family home at 15. (“This is obviously just my side of the story,” she writes, “but good luck getting his, because he’s dead … I didn’t do it!”). Her mother, while supportive at times, engages in her fair share of disappointing parenting, too.
A month on from publication and “the dust has settled”, Sanders says tentatively. “No one really wants to be written about, which is a shame, even if you think you’ve done it quite nicely. But we can’t live in a world where everything’s whitewashed.” That said, What’s That Lady Doing? is far from the score-settling exercise it could have been. What rings out from every page is astounding levels of generosity and forgiveness directed towards those that have mistreated her. (“Tell that to … !” she cries when I mention this, before naming a peripheral family member who has clearly been offended by the book.)
Her memoir was not initially so magnanimous. “The first draft was full of burning resentment and then one of my healers … I know, excuse that sentence, one of my healers as well, bloody hell,” she eyerolls. “She said: ‘You have to look at them with the compassion that you would want when you’ve made mistakes,’ and so then I was able to do a much kinder draft.”
As that anecdote suggests, the second half of the book sees Sanders turn to alternative therapies, complementary medicine and support groups in an attempt to come to terms with the trauma she has experienced, and let go of the resentment she (unsurprisingly) feels. In adulthood, she comes to love and celebrate her stepfather’s quirks and shortcomings, attends AA meetings and undergoes eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy to deal with the incredibly disturbing abuse she has been subjected to – including rape and sexual assault – by multiple men. Reckoning with the latter has been a slow process: “There’s so much shame attached to it; you’re not even revealing it to yourself. You’re getting on with your life trying to forget about it; you know it’s there, but you’re like: I’ll deal with that when I can.”
Early on in our conversation, Sanders expresses concern that anything she says about the news of Russell Brand being accused of sexual assault by four women – which broke days before we meet – might overshadow discussion of her own career. But mention of her personal experiences naturally brings her on to the topic. “The one thing I will say on the Russell Brand thing is that it blows my mind that people still don’t want to believe women – and that’s why I put that stuff [about assault] in the book – to let people know that it’s more ubiquitous than [it seems].” Brand denies the allegations.
She recently deleted her X (formerly Twitter) account “because there were so many people supporting him”. Brand has been “clever”, she alleges. “For years, he’s known this is going to come out so he’s been going in a different direction,” – essentially, sowing mistrust in the mainstream media. She says people have told her about their experiences with Brand.
Sanders did not keep this information to herself. At a gig this spring, she spoke about it on stage. “I just basically outed Russell Brand [as a predator] but in an amusing way and not at the cost of the victims,” is how she recalls it. In the industry, says Sanders, “everyone knew”. That said, she is keen to stress that this issue is not unique to the television or comedy industries. I ask about a passage in her book where she mentions a TV producer who “has date-raped so many women”, including one of Sanders’ friends, but is still posting “Instagram stories about being at Soho House”. Her response is not what I was expecting.
“I’m not going to discuss any of that, I don’t want to,” she says. “I don’t want it to be a witch hunt. I want to talk about my book, I don’t want it to be overshadowed.” This is in the book, though. “Then people can then find it in the book. I think there are rapists in every industry. I think it’s very hard to monitor it. What do you do? If you’re a producer and you know someone’s a rapist, don’t hire them. Beyond that, I don’t know.”
We can, however, talk about the other ways in which Sanders is working to make comedy less hostile to the reality of women’s lives. She is determined to bust taboos by discussing her “XL” labia in her live work and her writing. (“It’s not that big, I’ve never got it trapped in a lift, OK?” she writes during a very funny passage in the memoir.) She is struggling, however, to broadcast this fact on television. “I did Live at at the Apollo three years ago and talked about my labia and they cut it,” she says, before revealing that she has recently filmed another episode – this time as the host – where she mentioned it again. “I’ll see if they leave it in this time.”
Despite being refreshingly upfront, there is one thing Sanders won’t divulge: her age. In the book she says she didn’t tell anyone how old she really was for “a long time” because she “wasn’t comfortable with it” – without actually revealing what it is. I ask if she will tell me now but she demurs, citing ageism in the entertainment business. The 1985 birthdate on Wikipedia is wrong, she says – she has asked her agent to have it taken it down twice – but aside from that will only say that “people can piece it together” if they listen to the entire archive of her irreverent chat podcast Cuddle Club.
It may be missing key biographical details, but Sanders’ tale of rebuilding herself is full of far more valuable stuff: radical forgiveness and compassion, hard-won wisdom, the ability to make light of life’s darkness and impressive insight on the human condition. I particularly liked her thoughts on shame, an emotion that “doesn’t motivate change, quite the opposite”, she writes. “You think that is who you are, so you double down, a lost cause.” Sanders snorts when I pay her the compliment. “Are we putting it on the syllabus of schools now?!” she laughs. They could do a lot worse.
What’s That Lady Doing? False Starts and Happy Endings is out now.
