The Process of Writing
Comedian, actor, podcaster and now published author Aparna Nancherla ’05E was 11 when she got her first taste of stand-up and performing. After attending a public speaking class, the shy child of immigrants was encouraged by her mother to enter a speech contest. The topic was very broad: any issue affecting the South Asian community at that time.
Nancherla’s competitors’ speeches were about racism, exclusion and being “othered.” Hers? A competition-winning takedown of Bollywood movies that she wrote “purely out of my resentment of having to watch them, which my parents forced me to do.”
Comedian, writer, and actor Aparna Nancherla ’05 in conversation with editor, writer, and LitFest director, Jennifer Acker ’00, on Feb. 25, 2024.
“It was before subtitles, and [the recordings] were all pirated,” she explained during a conversation with Jennifer Acker ’00, founder and editor-in-chief of The Common literary journal, at Johnson Chapel on Feb. 25. “I never knew what was happening, and I had a lot of built-up anger. It was a full-on roast. People loved it.” In addition to bragging rights, the victory in the contest gave her an “inkling that humor has this power that maybe can kind of enrapture people in a way that you don’t always know how to get in normal life—at least I don’t,” she noted. “I feel like talking in front of a group of people kind of led me to that in a way that I couldn’t do with strangers” in smaller settings.
Nancherla describes this comedy origin story in her new book, Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself, and Impostor Syndrome. It was one of several topics covered in this discussion, the final event in a weekend of LitFest activities attended by students, faculty, staff and neighbors in and around the Town of Amherst. Now in its ninth year, the College’s celebration of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, spoken-word performance and Amherst’s “extraordinary literary life” featured craft talks, a poetry slam and discussions with three Pulitzer Prize winners—novelist Paul Harding, memoirist Natasha Trethewey, and science writer Ed Yong—National Book Award winner Justin Torres, poets Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris, and alumni authors Blair Kamin ’79, Lisa Biggs ’93 and Anne Pierson Wiese ’85.
Nancherla’s conversation with Acker also focused on her approach to her craft–writing essays and comedy bits–performing stand-up, being an introvert, and, of course, the term in the title of Nancherla’s book: impostor syndrome, the widespread modern phenomenon wherein people doubt their own skills and successes, and worry that they are frauds.
Nancherla hoped that writing about her impostor syndrome might cure it. Her verdict: “My theory was not salient.”
“In the most meta way, really, the book should just be blank, and I should turn that in, and that would be most authentic,” she laughed. Her writing process was about coming to terms with that, she said: “I’m also a lifelong perfectionist, so I had to find peace with the fact that a lot of the essays I wrote didn’t have neat, tidy endings, or that I started at one point and then I ended another one. … I kind of wanted to really get into those gray areas, which is harder with something like stand-up, where it’s a setup and then punchline.”
Somewhat counterintuitively for a comedian who performs live, appears in movies and on television, and hosts a podcast, among other pursuits, Nancherla nevertheless said that she deems herself a true introvert and feels anxious in interactions with people one-on-one or in small groups. “What comedy and performing gives me is a medium in which I can come to the stage prepared with what I want to communicate,” she told Acker. “It feels weirdly more manageable than [if] I’m going to tell a funny story at a dinner party.”
Audience members approach Nancherla for a meet-and-greet at the end of her talk.
Nina Theis, a resident of the Town of Amherst who attended the LitFest event, later commented, “It seems brave to me to identify as an introverted stand-up comic.” Theis also said that she was “really struck by the idea of trying to get your impostor syndrome to pull its weight by being the fodder for a book.”
Nancherla also fielded a question about comparing herself to people who work in more “traditional industries” than entertainment. The introvert credited her friends and fellow comedians with validating her and her work.
“If people say, ‘You need to pursue a serious actual job,’ it is hard to sometimes explain, ‘I’m doing this show for three people in a basement, and you’ll see!’” she explained. “I think a lot of it is surrounding yourself with people who support your vision, or at least are on a similar path where you guys can be buddies and champion each other. … I find that people are just trying to support each other as well as they can.”
