Comedian Cameron Esposito has never shied away from talking about her personal life onstage. In her reflective new memoir Save Yourself (Grand Central Publishing) she dives even deeper, looking back on her childhood in suburban Western Springs and the personal self-discovery that came with recognizing her own sexuality, coming out to her parents, and finding a home in the comedy world. The live stand-up performances at the Den that were set to coincide with the release of the book on March 24 have been cancelled, but lockdown is a good time to indulge in a read that’s both heart-breaking and heart-warming, with a heavy dose of laugh out loud humor.
Demoralizing in every way. [Laughs.] It’s isolating. It’s incredibly frustrating, because there is no feedback to get. I’m used to a live medium. It feels self-important. It was sometimes extremely harsh to live through some traumas that happened in my life that are included in the book. But also it was pretty amazing to revisit my younger self and find a lot of affection for myself. I don’t know if you liked yourself as a kid but I found myself humiliating, so to go back and meet that kid and realize that I was actually pretty awesome? I knew who I was. I had stuff I was into. I was really doing my own thing with gender nonconforming interests and presentation. And I kind of love that kid actually.
You talk about internalized homophobia in the book—do you have a message for people who are working through that themselves?
One hundred percent. When I talk about the fact that I used to want to be a priest and now I became a comic, to me that seems like such a direct through line. It literally feels like, “Oh, I ended up doing the same job!” because it really is about a group of people trying to figure out what is the most important thing. Like what are important things on the planet? The thing about religion is that most religions are corporations. That’s what the Catholic church is and so it creates corruption, self-interest and all the other things that happen when ideas are delivered by humans who are trying to preserve wealth and power.
