Being able to see the funny side of almost everything makes for quite a jolly life, and I think the comedian Helen Lederer has had that. In her new memoir, humour is applied to just about anything, from single motherhood to a failed gastric band to sex work (as a naive 19-year-old, Lederer worked in a massage parlour and worried about whether talc or oil should go on first, and whether using too much of each might create “some kind of clay vase”). Pain and laughter are never far from each other. A recent example: at an event with other famous guests, Lederer counted three or four people moving away from her in search of – what? – someone more important, perhaps. She finds it, she says, “quite hurtful, but also funny. What is it about me? Is it because they feel sorry for me because my status isn’t as high as theirs?” She thinks about status a lot. “I want to make that OK, an awareness of status without letting it defeat us, I suppose, without being cross.” She doesn’t want to be the needy person who accosts TV executives at parties and says: “Please tell me I’m better. Please give me a job.” She smiles. “Which I also did.”
I meet Lederer at her home in south London. She is gregarious and keen to be liked, generous with overblown and hilarious compliments: she is sure, she tells me, that one day I will win a Nobel prize or the Booker. She fizzes with energy, which she puts down partly to the testosterone she has started taking as part of hormone replacement therapy – “I’m not quite sure if it’s making me a bit louder. Am I shouting?” – and partly to nerves about her book. Lederer knows she can exasperate some people – I’m thinking of all the agents she talks about alienating in the book – but not others. “It seems that I can divide people. I can be annoying, but I don’t mean to be.” I don’t find her annoying, I find her a hoot, and her book proves Malcolm Gladwell’s theory that autobiographies written by people on lower rungs on the ladder are more interesting and entertaining than those by the people at the top.
