Taylor Tomlinson grew up certain. A strict religious upbringing and a loss that arrived early handed her a world with clean edges, where answers existed and she was expected to have them. Actually, Nevermind is the story of what happened when life kept refusing to cooperate, told by a comedian who has clearly decided that being wrong, repeatedly, is better material than being right once.
The argument, stated plainly: changing your mind is a skill, and the people who can't do it are mostly just frightened. Tomlinson tests that claim against the only evidence she fully controls, her own biography. It's a narrow evidentiary base, and she knows it. There's no pretense of research or a survey of other people's reversals. What holds the thesis up is the range of things she's revised: faith, assumptions about adulthood, what a good career is supposed to look like, and her family. Each essay is a small trial, and the verdict is usually that she was less sure than she sounded.
The strongest stretch concerns her time around @midnight. She wanted to host it, got interviewed, and was eventually hired, only to find the job she'd chased didn't suit her, all while she was dealing with an illness doctors couldn't diagnose. She left after two seasons. That sequence carries the book's whole idea in miniature, because walking away from a prize you worked for is a much harder revision than dropping an opinion. She also gives House on the Rock a mention, which suggests the digressions are as welcome as the big confessions.
The tone is where this book is easiest to recommend. Tomlinson shares enough about her family and her anxiety for the stakes to register, then stops before it turns into an inventory of every bad memory. Mental health, family dynamics, and the work of getting over fears all come up without any lecturing, and the jokes arrive at the moments when a more solemn writer would have reached for a lesson. The chapters are short and self-contained, so you can binge it or take one at a sitting. Listeners say her own narration has the timing of her specials, and the prose reads as if it was written to be said aloud.
Why you should read
- Fans of Tomlinson's stand-up who want the person behind it
- Readers of humorous essay collections and comedian memoirs
- Anyone leaving a rigid belief system or a stalled career
- Audiobook listeners who like an author narrating her own life
What to expect
- Short, self-contained essays you can binge or sip
- Candid but not exhaustive about family and grief
- Jokes woven through the heavier material
- A few essays feel more skippable than others
The weak points are the ones a debut written on a deadline might have. At least one reader felt a few more months of editing would have made it a stronger book, and that's a fair read of a collection that sometimes feels a draft short of finished. Still, calling the book a collection of essays rather than a memoir in chapters turns out to be the right instinct, since it lets each piece be a bit uneven without breaking a promise of continuity. What survives is her central bet, that revising a belief out loud, on the page, in front of strangers, is funnier and more useful than defending it, and for most of its 271 pages she wins that bet.