At the end of her first year at the Victorian College of the Arts, Michelle Brasier’s acting teachers told her she hadn’t made it to second year: that she was too young; that she lacked “life experience”; that she had “no well of pain from which to draw”.
The following year, she suffered third-degree burns to her legs during an accident with a home heater, was hospitalised for more than a month and had to learn to walk again. Shortly after she was released from hospital, her dad died of pancreatic cancer – two weeks after he had been diagnosed. Brasier was just 20.
Reading about this chapter of Brasier’s life and what she describes as the “telenovela fuckery of my twenties”, you can’t help feeling as though the universe might have been playing some kind of dark cosmic prank on her. Life experience? Pain? By the time she was 28, she’d also lost her beloved elder brother, aged 42, to bowel cancer, and had been told she had a 97% chance of developing some kind of cancer herself.
“I mean, I’ve had a lot of life experience now,” Brasier understates. We’re talking over the phone ahead of the release of her memoir. The day before, she returned to her home in Melbourne after a month at Edinburgh fringe festival with her most recent show, Legacy.
It’s been a very big year: she has also recorded and released an album of songs from her shows, filmed an episode of ABC’s Australian Story, taken her award-winning 2021 show Average Bear to Los Angeles and New York (where she sold out her Off Broadway show) and toured the UK with her 2022 show Reform.
After seven months of globetrotting and “suitcase living”, she says, “I’m so grateful for everything, but I also am just so grateful to sit in my bath and watch a trashy movie while my dog tries to get in, you know?”
She’s not pausing for long: this week she embarks on a month-long book tour before decamping to Sydney to play the villain in the queer musical comedy Flat Earthers at the Hayes theatre.
“I haven’t had a day off in years,” she says, “except maybe Christmas.”
Brasier’s career – and her life generally – was kicked into hyperdrive by the discovery she might have less time to live on Earth than the “average bear”. As she wrote in the Guardian in 2023: “It’s taught me to stop hesitating – and live my life in full colour.”
On her dying dad’s advice, she followed her musical theatre dreams and enrolled at the University of Ballarat’s Arts Academy, where she honed her musical comedy and storytelling skills and met key future collaborators, including the members of sketch comedy troupe Aunty Donna.
Over the next decade, even as she grappled with grief over her brother’s diagnosis and then death, and her own genetic predisposition to cancer, she was building a career from being very silly. She appeared on stage as part of comedy ensemble Backwards Anorak and duo Double Denim; and on screen, in Aunty Donna’s YouTube and then Netflix series, and in spots on shows such as Get Krack!n and Utopia. She won awards for her live shows, and was handpicked by Shaun Micallef to join the cast of his satirical news show Mad As Hell.
But it was her 2021 show Average Bear, in which she tells the story of her life and her stand-off with mortality, that took things to the next level. A masterful act of storytelling that deploys standup, physical and musical comedy, Average Bear ricochets from hilarious anecdotes about growing up in Wagga Wagga (“teen pregnancy capital of Australia”) to songs such as The Fingering Shed, to heartfelt reflections on loss and grief, and the kind of philosophising more commonly found in self-help podcasts.
Debuting at Melbourne international comedy festival, it sold out its season, was nominated for most outstanding show, and was subsequently filmed as a TV special for Channel 10. At a Sydney festival performance in January, I was among many audience members alternately roused to snorting laughter and reduced to snotty tears. (At the end of each show, she invites the audience to come and see her afterwards for a hug and a chat; there’s always a line.)
“It was such a little show when I first wrote it,” Brasier says. “I was like, alright, I’ll have a go at a solo show or whatever. I wanted to make something that could be done in an Irish pub and not need too much tech – just a guitar and some vocals. I wanted the story to be at the heart of it.”
It wasn’t just the story that proved compelling, but the show’s generous impulse towards its audience. As Brasier told Wil Anderson’s Wilosophy podcast, “I want them to feel joyful … I really want people to leave [the show] feeling like they don’t have to worry about tiny little things, and they should go out and do the things that they want to do. They shouldn’t waste their time. They should savour every whisky or cup of tea or conversation. And they should get off their fucking phones.”
This is the same impulse she brings to her memoir, which is decidedly unusual: a nonlinear jumble of anecdotes, reflections, advice and lists (including numerous playlists). “I wanted it to feel like doing a tarot reading,” she explains. “I want people to be able to pick up the book and open it and be like, ‘This is the chapter I obviously need to read today.’”
Like Average Bear, Brasier’s memoir will have you in tears one chapter and laughing out loud the next – but also occasionally gasping with horror. (A chapter in which she describes a mad dash by plane and car to get to Montreal’s Just For Laughs festival while “laying eggs” of pus and blood from a surgery wound near her vagina is both hauntingly gross and hilarious.)
The book’s title, My Brother’s Ashes are in a Sandwich Bag, is representative of Brasier’s light, playful approach to life’s difficult moments.
“I think in a way, I’m emulating my brother,” she reflects. “He was always full of advice, and it was never delivered with a serious face … It was always an offering of generosity, and always in the form of an anecdote. It was always a story.”
My Brother’s Ashes are in a Sandwich Bag by Michelle Brasier is out now through Ultimo Press. Brasier’s album, Trilogy Mixtape, is available on Bandcamp. Flat Earthers: the Musical opens at the Hayes theatre in Sydney on 11 October 2024
