Maeve in America Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  Maeve in America

  “If Tina Fey and David Sedaris had a daughter, she would be Maeve Higgins. (And while I’m building the fantasy family of comedy, let’s put Nora Ephron somewhere on the family tree.) Higgins’s essays cover subjects ranging from what kind of shelter dog she would be to emigrating from Ireland, but a single thread weaves through each one: that elusive feeling of laughing around a big lump in your throat.”

  —Glamour

  “Wickedly funny . . . with incisive humor and deep humility . . . Higgins has the rare gift of being able to meaningfully engage with politics and social ills while remaining legitimately funny.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Witty, humane, and topical, these essays offer an enlightened perspective on modern American culture while probing the energetic inner life of a bright young Irish comic. A warmly intelligent and insightful collection.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “If this is your first time reading Maeve Higgins, I’m jealous. She’s hilarious, poignant, conversational, and my favorite Irish import since U2. You’re in for a treat.”

  —Phoebe Robinson, New York Times bestselling author of You Can’t Touch My Hair

  “Maeve Higgins is hilarious. She is the true Irish voice of our American generation.”

  —Amy Schumer

  “Maeve Higgins is brilliant; but her brilliance isn’t the braggy, headlight kind that tries to trap her subjects deer-like in a cold, dead glare. Instead, she lights every room she enters with warmth, welcome, and generous rays of sheer funny. And in this book, she illuminates the world.”

  —John Hodgman, bestselling author of Vacationland

  “Maeve Higgins is easily one of my favorite, most treasured comedic voices. She is one of those rare artists who makes her unique point of view relatable and refreshing, leaving you feeling like you’ve been on the same page with her your whole life.”

  —Kristen Schaal

  “Until space aliens land in America, Maeve Higgins from Ireland is the next best thing. She offers fresh and insightful perspectives from a faraway place on all we take for granted.”

  —Neil deGrasse Tyson

  “Maeve Higgins is the funniest writer I know. And Maeve in America is just so smart and joyful. I especially like it when she’s unhappy. Because she’s very funny about it. Always be unhappy, Maeve!”

  —Jon Ronson, author of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  MAEVE HIGGINS is an absolute legend, but she’s modest about it. The host of the hit podcast Maeve in America: Immigration IRL, she is a comedian who has performed all over the world, including in her native Ireland, Edinburgh, Melbourne, and Erbil. Now based in New York, she co-hosts Neil deGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk on National Geographic and has appeared on Comedy Central’s Inside Amy Schumer and @midnight. Maeve’s one true love is writing. She’s the author of two essay collections for Hachette UK, and her work appears regularly in The New York Times and The Irish Times.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2018 by Maeve Higgins

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Higgins, Maeve, author.

  Title: Maeve in America : essays by a girl from somewhere else / Maeve Higgins.

  Description: New York, NY : Penguin Books, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017052944| ISBN 9780143130161 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781101993651 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Higgins, Maeve. | Comedians—United States—Biography. | Internet personalities—United States—Biography. | Conduct of life—Humor. | LCGFT: Essays. | Humor.

  Classification: LCC PN2287.H496 A3 2018 | DDC 792.702/8092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017052944

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  Cover design: Matt Vee

  Version_1

  For Liam, Aoibhinn, Cathal, Hazel, Nora, Sadie, and Daniel.

  You think I am your aunt, but really I am your mother.

  Contents

  Praise for Maeve in America

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Swimming Against Dolphins

  Rent the Runway

  Pen as Gun

  Call Me Maeve

  Aliens of Extraordinary Ability

  Five Interactions, One Man

  Stormy with the Calm Eyes

  Compliments Girl on Your Kiss

  Summer Isn’t the Same Without You

  Are You My Husband?

  How Funny

  Small Talk

  Wildflowers

  Other People’s Children

  The Golden Record

  Sources and Acknowledgments

  Swimming Against Dolphins

  SLIPPING INTO SHOCK, using all my strength just to keep my head above the choppy waters of the Pacific Ocean, I couldn’t muster up the energy to climb back onboard the boat. I just clung on to the ladder, making a sound quite similar to a shouting goat. The tour guide leaned over the side and called out, “Up you get! Come on, nearly there, you’ll be fine!” in a chirpy but anxious tone, the one you’d use to coax an aging relative back into the nursing home. I couldn’t move. She climbed down the ladder and hauled me up on deck herself, tiny and all as she was. I lay there for a minute, curled up like a fern. A vomiting fern. “Are you pregnant?” she asked, and I shook my head. “It’s just that dolphins are the midwives of the sea and it seemed like they were trying to help you.” “No, they weren’t,” I said, coughing up seawater and my lunch. “They were trying to kill me.”

  You see, I once swam with wild dolphins off the coast of New Zealand. If I told you that, and nothing else, how would that statement make me sound? Am I a chill girl, a surfer, not just on the waves but on life itself, someone who just goes with the flow, happy wherever, a lithe beauty laughing in the flickering light of a campfire, ankle bracelets glinting, sun-bleached head of hair thrown back? Do I love nature, treasure all the creatures of the sea, and commune with Mother Earth as seamlessly as a sunflower, as fluently as a fish? I would love for that to be the case, but that is absolutely not the case. It’s dead wrong. It’s purely aspirational, and does not match the truth even a little bit.

  Here on dry land, I blunder around the place making mistakes all day long, misunderstanding others, managing to over- and underestimate my own motivations and capabilities as I go about the endlessly tricky business of being a regular human being. So why should I be any different under the sea? Particularly when I’m surrounded by dolphins—the most malevolent creatures known to man.

  At that time, I was coming to the end of a three-month stint of comedy festivals throughout Australia and New Zealand. I ask you again, how does that statement make me sound? Like a world traveler, a touring artist, shuttling between airplanes
and hotels and theaters with a host of funny and charming friends, taking things global? There is truth to that, of course—I was getting opportunities to work and travel that I had never dreamed of. I mean that. It was never my dream to stay in a hotel in Bundaberg with an older English comic who closed the show every night with a routine, that never failed to bring the house down, comparing his child’s birth and wife’s body during said birth, as akin to watching his favorite pub burn down. I’d just kind of followed along a string of various successes and failures and found myself here; I was on the road, a job coveted by many, but one I never quite chose. And this was the reality—lots of checking in, to flights and hotels and venues, lots of time spent with people I’d never voluntarily choose to spend time with, and plenty of bewildered, if not hostile, audience members waiting for the big loud boys they preferred.

  Please understand, there were occasional bursts of magic too, like the time I saw electric-green frogs hopping around in a thunderstorm outside the theater in Cairns, or the time in Wellington when I felt like the audience and I merged consciousness when I was discussing the merits of pineapple upside-down cake. Perhaps it was one of those gems, some bewitching nugget of connection and magic, that I was hunting for that fateful day I booked myself on a tour to swim with dolphins.

  I doubt that, though. I believe that it was something a little more mundane. It was a laziness on my behalf, a reluctance to figure out my own dream, and a tacking on to other peoples’ dreams, that made me decide I simply had to swim with dolphins. All my life I’ve meandered around, wondering what I should do with myself. Aside from getting champagne in your eye, or being snapped at by your pet toucan, bemoaning a lack of purpose is the most privileged problem in the known universe, so I won’t drone on about it. Suffice to say that when my friends dreamed of moving to Paris or running the Grand Canyon or having a baby with Jake Gyllenhaal, and set about achieving those dreams by respectively learning French, running, and finding a different brown-haired guy, I peered into my own future and saw only fog. Not having a dream didn’t bother me, until someone would ask where I saw myself in five years, or what my dream was, or some such hideous question. And then I’d say, “I’d like to swim with dolphins,” and they would mercifully leave me alone.

  Now, here I was taking the necessary steps to make this dream that was not mine come true. At seven in the morning I boarded a minibus driven by a blocky, scowling woman. I was the only one on it for the first fifteen minutes but that didn’t stop her from using her microphone headset. “Just got one more hotel pickup and we’ll be off to Rotorua,” she boomed. I asked her how many people were coming. “Just two, because it’s off-season now, mate, it’s unusual for people to still be hanging around.” We stopped and collected a very old American couple. I helped the lady in and her hand was soft and tiny, like a chick. It took the pair ages to get on and settled. The driver rested her head against the steering wheel for a second, then said, “And we’re off.” In a menacing way. The old lady made a “here we go” face at me and I was very glad she was there.

  We exchanged small talk for a minute or two but it was difficult to hear over the amplified sighs of the driver. Also, I reminded myself, this was their holiday and I shouldn’t inflict my company-starved self on them too much, so I sat two seats away from them and looked out the window. The driver reeled off information in a bored tone that bounced off the minibus walls. “Quick fact about glowworms for you guys. The fellas that burn the brightest, well, they are the hungriest fellas.” In the beginning, I and the Americans encouraged her by saying, “Oh,” and nodding at each other, but that seemed to irritate her. We piped down and let her get on with it. Two and a half hours passed in a long, slightly nervous heartbeat.

  We got to Rotorua and were deposited underneath a sign with three arrows pointing in different directions, one to THE DOLPHIN EXPERIENCE, one to THE WHALE WATCHING EXPERIENCE and one to THE CAFÉ EXPERIENCE. I never found out what The Café Experience was, but I’d imagine it was a cup of coffee and perhaps a pastry in a mildly comfortable chair. The American lady smiled a goodbye to me, linked her husband’s arm, and I watched as they slowly walked in the direction of The Café Experience. I wished I could join them, and take photos of scones and flat whites to show the folks back home. Instead, I waited alone on a low wall, looking out at the restless gray sea. I thought the Pacific was supposed to be a sort of turquoise color that came lapping gently up along white sandy beaches, but not so, at least not there. Annoyed, I threw some stones into the sea, and tried my best not to think about what was rattling around inside there under the water. The thing is, even thinking about fish makes me shiver. I have ichthyophobia, self-diagnosed, and not rational. It started when I was thirteen and my brother’s peculiarly athletic goldfish would leap at me from his tank and flop around my room for long minutes as I stood on the bed and screamed for help. The last time I went to an aquarium, in 1999, I fainted. I can’t bear to look at fish, and I hoped I wouldn’t see any that afternoon.

  At noon I went inside, paid my money, and joined the group. There were about twenty people, mainly backpackers from healthy socialist countries like Norway, and a few middle-aged couples with teen children. Hearing them all chatter away happily, I realized that nobody else was a lone comic. We sat and watched a short video about how great dolphins are, and how we should behave around them. As I watched them swim around on-screen, I shuddered involuntarily. It showed them speeding along, slicing through the water like bullets, but giant fish-shaped bullets. I started to get knots in my stomach. Until that moment, I hadn’t thought about how much dolphins look like very big fish. They are mammals but they look like fish, in the same way tomatoes are fruit but look like vegetables. It began to dawn on me that I, a person who is terrified of fish, should probably not swim with dolphins.

  I shook the feeling off. I would be fine! I reminded myself that dolphins are not fish, fish are mackerel and pike and . . . and goldfish. People love swimming with dolphins, it is a well-known dream, the ultimate bucket list item to be ticked off, a dying wish. Many people travel long distances and pay huge amounts of money to achieve this dream! Besides, it’d be crazy to turn back now, after the video and the safety talk and everything. These dolphin guys were charming and warm-blooded, not a million miles away, evolutionarily speaking, from Michael Fassbender.

  By all accounts, they were very sweet creatures. The voice-over said that dolphins empathize deeply with humans. Apparently, they even adopt peoples’ emotions as their own sometimes, and when depressed people swim with them, the next day the dolphins wake up with a “oh, what’s the point anyway?” feeling. Upon hearing this, a couple of English girls crinkled up their faces and said, “Awwwww,” and their father squeezed his wife’s shoulders as they shared a look. Fortunately, continued the narrator, the dolphins we were going to hang out with were wild and therefore not overly exposed to human sadness, so they had a great attitude.

  A woman wearing a dolphin experience T-shirt and flip-flops came and introduced herself as Kate, our dolphin guide. She opened with a warning. “I want to let you all know that there’s a very real possibility we may not actually see any dolphins.” My panic, which had been rising steadily since I saw a dolphin on-screen, began to subside. Kate explained that since the dolphins were wild and the area they roamed around was the actual ocean, the boat’s captain didn’t know where they were all the time. “If we can’t find them using our sonar and radar machines, you’ll get your money back, and in that case at least you’ll have had a nice boat trip.” I began to clap, but quickly stopped when nobody else joined in. I smiled through the rest of her speech. There was an out! The dolphins just needed to keep to themselves and us humans could all relax and have a cup of tea.

  After loosing another couple of unnerving facts on the group—“Dolphins can see behind them” and “Dolphins have sharp, conical teeth”—Kate sent us off to change into wet suits. The English sisters shrieked and laughed at
each other about how unflattering the wet suits were. Changing into a wet suit is definitely more fun with a group of friends. I found myself in that awkward position of doing an amusing thing with a group of people I didn’t know, but who all knew each other. I kind of laughed along aimlessly to show I was fun and relaxed and recognized the humor in situations, and that I certainly wasn’t some kind of dangerous drifter who studied human behavior so she could mimic it and pass as one of them, no, no, not at all.

  With much difficulty, I zipped up the back of my rubbery onesie and waddled with the rest of the group to the pier. We boarded a wide, flat, dolphin-seeking catamaran. It was drizzling now, and the sea looked like she wanted to be alone. Kate, however, was full of optimism. As she handed out binoculars, she told us to shout if we saw any movement at all. We traveled far, far out to sea. The farther we got from land, the more I questioned my reasoning. Why was I doing something I did not want to do? It was never my dream to be a touring comic, or to swim with dolphins. Why was I following this path that someone else had tramped down ahead of me, and what did I think I was doing, rushing to keep up with them and stay ahead of the person coming behind me? It was getting really cold, and my teeth began to chatter.

  As the waves swelled, Kate shouted to us that we were in a reliable part of the sea now, and the boat was going to zip around to the dolphins’ favorite locations. I squinted at her. It’s not like there are libraries or Mexican restaurants under the sea, so I wondered why they’d prefer one spot over another. I didn’t ask; instead I pretended to look through the binoculars.

  I immediately saw a huge school of dolphins breaking through the waves on my side of the boat. I felt a rush of pure terror. I put down my binoculars wordlessly and began to plot a way of distracting a boatload of people from seeing the one thing they were longing to see. No such luck. My face betrayed me, that’s what always happens. My face is so expressive that my sisters can tell what flavor ice cream I’m thinking about at any given moment. One of the English girls looked at me, then straight out to where the dolphins were. She screeched. I cursed her.