In June, the Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby’s standup show Nanette was released on Netflix. This supposed swansong of a set had previously stunned audiences from Melbourne to Edinburgh, with its devastating twists on who and what jokes are for, and how suffering and trauma are turned into material. What begins as an apparently mainstream routine segues into a story about something troubling that happened to Gadsby as a young woman, told first one way – and then, brutally, another; it’s at once a deconstruction of the art form (her work has been billed as “anti-comedy”), and a critique of her audience – angry, smart, radical.

Nanette’s second life turned Gadsby from a working comic into a global star, lauded for her candour and insight by everyone from Ellen Page to Monica Lewinsky. Her father, she says, has always collected anything written about her, but his task is becoming more and more demanding. “With this whole Nanette business, he started going, ‘God, the articles are getting a bit long now. There was one in the New York Times – three pages. I’m not made of toner.’”

The writer and critic Roxane Gay, whose collection of essays Bad Feminist and memoir Hunger were critically praised bestsellers, covering everything from her past as a competitive Scrabble player to overeating, and her experiences of rape, tweeted Gadsby when her set first screened: “Nanette is simply remarkable. You moved me and have really made me think about humor, the self, self-deprecation and the uses of anger. Thank you so much. It’s just brilliant.”

They met for the first time a few weeks ago, at a cultural event in Los Angeles, where Gadsby has been living. Gay has just moved to the city permanently, after a few years of shuttling back and forth between LA and Indiana, where she was, until recently, an associate professor of English at Purdue University. They sit down to talk at Gay’s new house, which is so box-fresh you can still smell the paint. In the background, a large TV is playing a crime drama on mute. Gadsby, a fan of Gay’s work, arrives brimming with sarcastic, silly wisecracks. “Personally, I get so much out of your writing,” she tells her, “because I need your perspective. Otherwise, I’d be a racist prick.”

And so the conversation begins.

Roxane Gay Where are you living?

Hannah Gadsby Silver Lake [in Los Angeles]. I can’t believe that this is a city where they tell all our stories, and they can ignore people living in tents everywhere.

RG Nobody ever talks about it. Nobody stops and tries to do anything. It’s weird, it’s upsetting, and it does not give me a lot of faith in humanity.

HG How many bedrooms do you have here? [Laughs.]

RG I know. I guess I do have some extra space. I’m absolutely part of the problem.

HG I’ve been homeless.

RG How long?

HG For a long time I said six months, and then I look back on it, and it was quite a number of years where I was not supported – couchsurfing, and then I lived in a tent outside Byron Bay. I would hitchhike into town.

RG Were you still doing comedy at that time?

HG Hadn’t even started. I started when I was 27. It took a long time. I was at the end of this dirt track, at the back of a farm, illegally camping. That was for about four months. And then they had this huge storm and it flattened my tent. It was grim as fuck.

RG Were you ever scared that it was always going to be your life?

HG I was so sad. I look back on that time and now I understand, I was just getting through it. Every day was a struggle. I was so isolated. And there’s so much shame around it. I’m a storyteller, and I’ve never told that story. I mean, I’m not sharing a secret, but you know what I mean?

RG How old were you?

HG I was mid- to late-20s. It was a real rough patch, from 24 to 27.

RG There’s something about that age. I was not homeless, but my 20s were almost the roughest years. Almost as bad as my teens. Just trying to figure out, what do I do, where do I belong? And also, I was completely insane.

HG So you always knew you wanted to be a writer?

RG Always. From four years old, I knew. Which is good, but also bad, especially with immigrant parents, who are just like, what? No. You’re going to be a lawyer, doctor or engineer, which is the Haitian trifecta of careers. It was hard. They supported my writing, always, but they didn’t understand that it’s what I wanted to do full-time. They were being realistic and I was being a dreamer, and so I actually understand where they were coming from. But I always just believed I could make a go of it.

HG Ignorance is really a boon for that. [Looks at the TV.] There’s a bloody woman in the trunk!

RG [Laughs] I’m always watching crime procedurals.

HG I find them very comforting, for some reason.

RG Me, too. Law & Order: SVU.

HG Ooh, my fave. Shouldn’t be.

RG I feel a lot of guilt about it. What am I getting out of this display of trauma?

HG I actually think it’s acknowledgment of that kind of trauma.

A guy on a plane took a photo of me, to text his friends, to laugh at me

RG And there is, once in a while, justice. It’s very satisfying.

HG And great face-acting.

RG Almost as good as in the Fast And The Furious franchise. They have great face-acting. Great drive-face. One day I just want to make a compilation of all their driving faces.

HG I’ve only seen 7. Just for clarification, not all seven. Just 7.

RG You have so many to catch up on.

HG I heckle films. I’m the worst person to see films with. I heckled A Star Is Born. One line in it keeps coming back to me. He said [husky voice]: “You’re a songwriter.” [Laughs.] And she goes: “No, I’m not. My nose is too big.” That’s bad writing! Obviously they’ve mixed it up. “I can’t be a star, my nose is too big.” The ugliest people in the world are songwriters!

He just keeps popping up in her personal space. She’s sleeping at home in her bedroom, and she wakes up, and there he is. She’s like, what are you doing here? “Your dad let me in.” She’s having a nap. In her bedroom! ‘Can I touch your nose? No. Can I touch your nose? No. Oh, I’m touching it.’

RG Wow. [Laughs.] You’ve ruined the movie for me. Thank you.

HG A lot of it is just them in profile. Cos the nose is very important. He touches it. For me, it’s like that optical illusion: is it a vase, or two faces?

I used to be a cinema projectionist, when I was at uni. Or college, here. Land of the lingo. I said “trunk” earlier.

RG Instead of “boot”? Wow, you’re coming along, step by step. Are you going to be moving here permanently?

HG I’m betwixt and between. I did a month in London in February, then I was going to do five weeks in New York, and that blew out to nearly five months. There was a bit of a gas leak in the apartment. I kept going, “I’m so tired, I need to rest.” I was sending people a coffin emoji. I’d say, “I slept like I was in a coma!” I kept ringing my manager saying, “I’m really tired, it doesn’t feel right.” She said, “Course you are, this show’s a lot. It’s taking it out of you.” It was, and I knew that. I was up to 17 hours a day sleeping. I could have died.

RG That’s so dangerous. Did they fix it?

HG Yeah. And here I am. I had a rough time of it, to be honest. [Nanette] is hard enough, as an emotional thing. But in London I got bronchitis. In Edinburgh, I had a wisdom tooth impacted. The day after I had it out, I got a thing called dry socket, and that was four weeks of hell. But I feel better now. I’m a bit more chipper. Talking about trauma is exhausting.

RG It is, and I think that’s one thing people don’t realise.

HG And other people tend to give their trauma back to you.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I love what I do. I wouldn’t trade this for anything.’ Photograph: Barry J Holmes for the Guardian Photograph: Barry J Holmes/The Guardian

RG That’s the hard part. I hear so much, because I write about sexual violence, and fatness...

HG “I was raped, can we have a selfie?”

RG That is actually something that happens. It’s hard to balance the two. People are like, you’re so lucky, which, I am: really lucky. I love what I do. I wouldn’t trade this for anything. But there is an emotional cost. Especially after Hunger came out, and Not That Bad [an anthology about rape culture], it’s just a one-two punch. I toured both of them this year, and people have the most horrific stories.

HG Writing about trauma, I go deeper into the trauma. Because when you’re speaking it, it’s less – but I see it all. I think visually. So every night on stage, it would be…

RG …right there with you.

HG But it would be kind of edited. That story I tell about being beaten up at the bus stop, I worked out that I had two versions of that. When I first told the story, I had the version that I knew – how it happened – and then the version that I would tell people that I eventually told on stage. And it was easier for other people to hear, but it wasn’t easy for me to tell, because I knew I’d sold the story short.

Then I saw a guy do a set on TV so similar to my set, except his twist was, it’s hard being a man. He’s a nice guy, but come on. I remember being quite angry about that, because it was a phase where my career was plateauing a bit. I didn’t necessarily want his opportunities, but he was getting them, and I wasn’t even being offered them. I’m like, that’s my story. Not that he stole it, but I found it particularly galling because I thought, I can’t tell that story properly. And then I set myself the task. Can I tell that story, in full, and make it funny? I worked out very quickly that I could not. There’s just no way to make that funny.

RG A lot of the time people ask me, especially with Hunger, how could you write it out? Did you retraumatise yourself? But first of all, it’s been 30 years. Which is not to say I’m over it, but I’m as over it as I’m going to be. There’s a reason I didn’t write this book 20 years ago. Back then, it was too fresh. Now it’s just a very significant part of my history.

I’m amazed men still think they’ve settled the argument by telling women they’re fat and ugly

As I was writing it, I recognised that I was writing the only version I could write, which is not the whole truth, because I think the whole truth is just too horrifying to put into people’s heads. But it had been long enough that I had the necessary separation to be able to do it, and to have the necessary distance. Writing about rape wasn’t the hardest part about writing Hunger, at all. It was writing about fatness, and thinking about my body in this world, and the kind of issues that people throw in your way.

HG Because people don’t look at you going [puts on a sympathetic face], “You’ve been raped.” I mean, they do now, for me. [Laughs.]

RG [Laughs.] Now they know.

HG But I feel seen with hostility because of what I look like.

RG Not a day goes by where someone doesn’t stare at me. And now, I have to ask, what are they staring at? Are they staring at my height? Well, maybe. Are they staring at my weight? Absolutely. Or do they recognise me? Or all of the above? I feel so paranoid. The other day I was on a flight, and the guy next to me took a picture of me, to text to friends, to laugh at me.

HG Oh my God.

RG It was horrible. And I tweeted about it, and a bunch of people were like, you don’t know that he’s doing that. Maybe he’s a fan. I know my fans. This guy was not a fan. He was a super-rich white guy and I was just like, trust my lived experience. They’re also so angry that you’re not following the rules of having a body, and of being a woman. Are you a woman, or are you a man?

HG I used to get so annoyed. [Points down.] Hips: come on.

RG I have a woman’s body. I get called Sir, every day.

HG It’s so lazy. It’s just the short hair and the height, isn’t it? Someone tagged me in a post on Twitter, and it said, “Fuckin’ dyke, wearing a hat. There’s no need to wear a hat at night, except to say you’re a lesbian.” [Both laugh.]

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘We’re twins… basically the same person.’ Photograph: Barry J Holmes for the Guardian

RG I didn’t realise that was part of the code. There’s always something. When you’re not what people expect from a woman, they’re always going to be angry about it.

HG And also, when that’s not what they’re angry about, they’re angry about your words or what you do. I’m just so amazed that men still think that they’ve settled the argument by telling women they’re so fat and ugly that they wouldn’t fuck ’em. I decided that for myself. [Laughs.]

RG Whenever they say, “I would never fuck you”, I just think, thank God. You’re not on my list, either. It goes to show how deep that authority is ingrained for them, that they genuinely think telling you this is a thing.

HG But they silence you and stop listening just because you don’t stack up. I used my whiteness to its full effect when I was younger, because I had the superpower of invisibility and I could disappear in a room.

RG I would love that power. Ugh. I would love it.

HG It helps that I’m pear-shaped. I remember once, when I first started comedy, I heard, “You don’t even know she’s fat till she stands up.” Oh, good God. But I’d written all those jokes: “I’m like an iceberg.” It’s wound into your self-worth and how you think about yourself. It’s woven in at that tender age when you first start seeing yourself, and it doesn’t stop.

I’m nailing the funny. I’ve got to curb the earnestness a bit. But, light and shade

RG It doesn’t. The trolls get so incensed by a woman having an opinion or a thought or daring to think she’s funny, which, by the way, I’m very fucking funny, thank you.

HG Yeah, I’m nailing it.

RG Right? Not an issue.

HG I’m nailing the funny. I’ve got to curb the earnestness a bit. But, light and shade.

RG But they know the weak spots, so they go for appearance. They know that you can be smart and talented and funny, but it doesn’t matter if you’re not hot.

HG When I did the Emmys – I presented one, I didn’t win one, that’s very important to know – I got people complimenting me, and even people who think they identify with me, talking about my body. Stop talking about my body! It’s like: “A win for fat girls”. What? Is it? Now that you’ve said that? “Jeez, you need to look at a treadmill.” I do. And I walk past it.

What’s frustrating is that I want to tell people just how hard trauma and shame is, and that’s what makes you uncomfortable in your skin. That’s what makes you unhealthy, that will shorten your life. The weight itself? People like you and I, we can hold it.

RG Absolutely. People keep talking about how fat is unhealthy. Because we don’t go to the doctor, because we know what we’re going to get at the doctor – I’ve gone to the doctor for a sore throat, and he’s been like, “Lose weight.”

HG “Don’t drink Coke.” I don’t.

RG I need some amoxicillin because I have strep throat, so weight loss is not a solution for strep. I’m a different kind of doctor, but I know that. I’ve had a stomach issue for about 10-12 years now, and it’s pretty debilitating. I’ve gone to doctors in four different states, just to try and figure it out. Each doctor has told me, lose weight. Now I’ve lost 150lb, and my stomach still hurts. So perhaps now we could try something different.

HG I had gallstones when I was 15.

RG Me too! When I was 15.

HG We’re basically the same person.

RG We are! Twins. [Laughs.] We look just alike.

HG Maybe that guy thought you were me on the plane. That’s my demographic, rich white men who laugh at women.

RG They love you, I’m sure they do.

HG You know, I have a strange demographic. My old demographic was surprisingly wide. Older women, suburban mums, families and a lot of straight guys. That’s really what drove me to doing Nanette, because I thought, whoa, I don’t know how to talk to this. I thought I was putting myself back in the margins, but in hindsight I can see that I was drilling down on the human condition – and hey, everyone’s got it.

RG There are times when people come up to me in the signing lines at my events and they start talking to me about my work, and they really know my work, and they’re not what I would have assumed to be my primary demographic.

HG It’s really nice, isn’t it?

RG It is really nice. And I think, I have a little more reach than I thought.

• This conversation appears in the Guardian’s Weekend magazine and has been edited and abridged for length.

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