Taylor Tomlinson turns off the mic to tell all in ‘Actually, Nevermind’

There’s an alternate universe where Taylor Tomlinson is a young adult fantasy author holed up in a cabin miles from civilization.

“ I don’t know if you have some sort of backup career or backup life that you go to in your head when you’re overwhelmed or fed up with your career or whatever process you’re in,” she asks in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel Denver ahead of a two-show night. “That was in the back of my head, [I was] like, ‘Well, I could just move to the woods and write books.’”

In this world, she’s a 32-year-old comedian with four Netflix stand-up specials and a two-season stint as the host of late-night game show “After Midnight.”

Her manager told her that people would probably be more interested in her memoir before a series centering on magic and dragons, so she started writing her own story two years ago.

A self-diagnosed workaholic, Tomlinson spent 10 years constantly moving. From a combination of mold exposure and severe burnout from filming “After Midnight” on weekdays and performing in different cities on weekends, she fell ill for months and was forced to take a break.

In that time, she wrote “Actually, Nevermind.” Coming out Tuesday, the autobiographical essay collection delves into the aspects of life that she changed her mind about since her mother died when she was 8 years old.

“Actually, Nevermind” opens with an eclectic mix of three quotes from “Anne of Green Gables” by Lucy Maud Montgomery, celebrated writer Joan Didion, and the 2001 Anne Hathaway-led comedy film “The Princess Diaries.” Tomlinson wanted a combination of funny and serious excerpts capturing grief, but also a quote about evolving as a person.

In the classic coming of age novel “Anne of Green Gables,” a young Anne Shirley states, “I’m not a bit changed — not really. I’m only just pruned down and branched out. The real me — back here — is just the same.”

That’s the essence of Tomlinson’s realizations in her book — she’s growing into herself but that girl who started performing stand-up shows on the church circuit at 16 is still in there.

Tomlinson has a bit from her first Netflix special “Quarter-Life Crisis” about your 20s being a period to “fish trash out of the lake before it freezes over.” She asks how I’m enjoying my 20s, to which I bluntly reply, “It’s a nightmare.”

“ My 20s were a nightmare, too, and I was waiting to be 30, and I was like, ‘When I turn 30, I’m going to be solidified and great.’ And then I turned 30, and it was like the last two years I have probably changed just as much, if not more, than I did in my 20s,” she says. “It’s been much rockier than I anticipated.”

In speaking with her friends, she realized they also felt a disconnect between the lives they envisioned for themselves and their realities. Tomlinson channeled that uncertainty into a jumping-off point for her book.

She reflected on when she began questioning the trajectory of her life and traced it back to her mother’s death.

“ I didn’t know if I was even going to write about my mom at all when I first got the book [deal] because I was like, ‘Well, I talked about it in ‘Look At You,’ and I’ve talked about it in interviews,’ but that’s the thing about losing a parent or any big traumatic grief event is you’re always getting hit by waves of it, and then you’re always untangling it,” she says.

In creating “Actually, Nevermind,” Tomlinson pored through her mother’s diary, deciding to include a few excerpts in the finished book. For most of Tomlinson’s life, she regarded her mother as a flawless, devout Christian whom she desperately yearned to impress.

Her mother married young, so she tried to hit that milestone, too.

“I didn’t manage it and self-sabotaged a lot,” she says. “Now, I’m grateful that I didn’t get married young, but at the time it was all I wanted because I wanted to fit in and I wanted to be someone she would’ve liked, someone she had things in common with.”

Through reading her mother’s diary entries, Tomlinson began to heal from the impossible standards she set for herself to follow in her mother’s footsteps.

“ She was sort of this perfect, infallible character in my brain for so much of my childhood, so it was helpful to read about her being like, ‘I’m nervous about getting married. We got pregnant on accident,’” Tomlinson says. “There’s stuff I didn’t include about arguments she had with my dad in college. It was just very human, and it was very encouraging to go, ‘Oh, it wasn’t like this perfect frictionless decision for her.’ It’s not like she just nailed it and did everything perfectly.”

One of Tomlinson’s largest shifts in perspective was no longer feeling parental responsibility toward her three younger siblings.

“ I went from their sister to a weird half parent figure when I was still a kid,” she says. “And I made all these missteps because I was also a kid. And then young adulthood was confusing because I had been waiting for everyone to get old enough to be friends with me.”

Now, Tomlinson’s siblings all take care of each other in their own ways. She refers to them as her “soul mates” and feels guilty wishing for a romantic partner when she already has three lifelong best friends.

While Tomlinson remains close with some of her mother’s relatives, she has been estranged from her father for five years. She writes about the sadness of not speaking to someone you feel so alike, but she doesn’t go into extreme detail about cutting ties.

“ There’s some things you just want to keep for yourself, you know?” she says. “You don’t want every painful private detail about who you are and what’s happened to you available to Google because it just makes you feel like you’re a raw nerve walking around, and you can’t get it back once you’ve shared it.”

“And you want something to say on a fifth date,” she jokes.

After processing the heartache of losing another parent in a different way, Tomlinson allowed herself to miss the good memories with her father and assuage any longing for revenge.

In her essay “I’m Gay Now,” Tomlinson explores her bisexuality and the transition from chasing male validation to feeling comfortable in herself. She came out at around 28 years old. Part of what took her until then was feeling the need to prove that she deserved to identify as queer.

In essays on sexuality, faith and ambition, she trades the pursuit of perfection for hard-won self-acceptance, exposing a more vulnerable offstage self still learning to do her best.

(Sela Shiloni)

“ I think that’s just a theme throughout my entire life,” she says. “I felt like I needed to earn the label of comedian. I felt like I needed to earn the label of queer. I needed to earn love.”

Her brother helped her understand that she didn’t have to achieve the title — she’s always been gay.

With all of her adulthood realizations, Tomlinson also reflects on what she wishes she could tell her younger self.  Talking to a 16-year-old Taylor, she writes, “The most valuable thing about us cannot be all the things we haven’t done.”

“ So much of my childhood was like, ‘Don’t drink, don’t do drugs, don’t have sex. Don’t step out of line,’” she says. “I wanted to experience things more than I wanted to be this pure version of myself that was performing for the Lord.”

“Actually, Nevermind” is a reflection of Tomlinson when she puts down the microphone, and she is nervous for readers to see that side of her.

“ I feel pretty good about me on stage. Me in the room, I feel really insecure about,” she says. “I’ve gotten to a place where I feel pretty confident about taking up like 45 minutes to an hour and a half of your time. Eight hours, I think, is what the audiobook is. I’m like, ‘Eight hours is a lot more than that.’ So it’s been a real test of confidence.”

After years of chasing perfection, Tomlinson says she finds comfort in knowing that she may never be the world’s greatest anything.

“ In my 20s, I think I was always trying to be the best,” she says. “And now I’m like, ‘I’m going to do my best.’”