“I wish you could come over and see this,” Wendy Spero tells me while staying at her mother’s Upper East Side apartment in New York City during her recent book tour stint. “It’s so cluttered and claustrophobic; I feel validated,” she exclaims proudly. The apartment that she describes in such dramatic, hilarious detail in her first book Microthrills: True Stories from a Life of Small Highs (Hudson Street Press, August 2006) clearly hasn’t changed. In her delightfully quirky yet touching collection of interwoven essays, Spero tells tales of big city adventures, including trick or treating, selling knives, dealing with crazy roommates and drug tests, learning to drive as an adult in LA, and searching for a connection to the father who died when she was less than a year old. The 31-year-old comedian pokes fun of her mother’s interference even in the acknowledgements page while exploring a life by turns over-the-top (see the phrase “cockblocking Hugh Grant”) and utterly
mundane (buying a new jacket). Casual as can be, she'll let drop that she's only drank alcohol once, but slips in numerous mentions of pot-fueled adventures.

Later, from her home in Los Angeles, fresh from her “kids’ party” of a wedding and during a break in her nationwide book tour, the perpetually antic, pint-sized comedian shows her true Peter Pan wings while discussing her love of candy, her mother’s unlikely comedic career, and why writing doesn’t come easy.

-Rachel Kramer Bussel, 2006

Rachel Kramer Bussel: How did you coin the term "microthrills" and can you define it?

Wendy Spero: I saw the movie Microcosmos, this orgasmic movie, it’s about bugs, it’s not a nature film, but this blockbuster movie with all these crazy sex scenes. I was very stoned at the time I saw it, and thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen. Because I have such an enormous fear of bugs, seeing them so up close made them quirky and interesting and compelling. I was obsessed with it for a long time.

A microthrill is an adventure on a small scale. Because I’m so high maintenance, and slightly neurotic, I can’t do bungee jumping or mountain climbing, but I get a kick out of bizarre life moments. I felt like there was no word to define a moment that was bizarre and interesting and compelling but wasn’t an adventure. It was a thrill, but not a thrill in the same way that someone else might define it; it was a safe thrill.

RKB: Was it a lifelong thing?

WS: I’ve always had a theory about life. For example, in the book I talk about selling knives door to door, with me trying to follow up on the piece of junk mail inviting me to sell knives - that’s something I would do. I seek out things that are particularly fun and bizarre. It’s not “oh, my life is so interesting,” I just can’t stand mediocrity and boredom, but I’m also really fearful of things that are rollercoastery. My friends have always thought of me as someone who gets a kick out of things that are strange or weird or coincidental, more so than the average person.

After the book, I was coming back to New York and I lost my bag. At the time, it was the most upsetting thing that had ever happened to me. I was in a cab and it drove off with my bag; I thought I was gonna lose my mind. I’m so obsessed with certain items that I’ve collected over the years; I felt like someone had died. I called 311, the lost and found bureau of New York, and I couldn’t breathe. The woman was like, “I’m gonna need you to take a deep breath, I will stay with you.” They treated it just like it was a 911 call; they transferred me and took it really seriously. Even as I was convulsing with terror, I was thinking, this is amazing. They were so adorable by treating it with such validity; to me that was this other little microthrill. Everyone would find that amusing, but I logged it into my brain as “another fun thing that happened.”

I eventually did find the bag, but the experience of talking to the woman and her saying, “I will stay with you," and people treating me like I’m on life support . . . The losing of the bag was not a good thrill, but her reaction on the phone was so adorably hilarious.

Had I lost the bag, perhaps I would have remembered the incident in another manner. Things like the selling knives experience and even my mother walking in on me while I was fooling around all the time in high school, I relish in this weird way.

It’s the opposite of a macrothrill, which would be a more traditional way of finding excitement in the world via big adventures like going camping across the country. I instead would find adventure in sitting in a coffee shop and watching people with my binoculars.

RKB: Do the microthrills find you, or do you feel like you turn moments into microthrills?

WS: I guess it is about perspective. Some people would have similar experiences and never consider them as thrilling as I do.

I’m a sensory overload type of person. I felt that way when I met you. “Oh my god, I want to eat you!” I’m not exaggerating and I’m not being fake, and I almost feel like I want to implode.

In a way, I feel things almost more than other people do sometimes. For example, my stuffed animals. I get such joy from them on a daily basis, so that’s me seeking them out, but I feel like I’ve had a lot of stuffed animals that have come into my life via accident but my reaction to them might be more exaggerated then the normal person. Or fruity markers-they smell so good you just want to stick them so far up your nose. I feel a similar way about mushing things, I go into the supermarket and just imprint my hand along the entire bread aisle. That will entertain me for a good hour. In part I seek them out, maybe I’m especially open to them.

RKB: Are all microthrills positive, or can there be negative ones?

WS: I live a kind of tortured existence. I’m very neurotic in that I get very worried and very indecisive.

I feel emotionally invested in small things so that if my stuffed animal is lost, I will be so sad, so I think you pay a price. Just like a bungee jumper, any adventurer would find that they pay a price for their adventuring. They’d get scrapes on their legs. Even with something like candy; I’m really obsessed with candy, which would strike most people as a microthrill, but I’m having profound root canal problems.

RKB: You mentioned that your mother’s had some interesting reactions to the book.

WS: It’s been this saga. She’s so funny. At one point, she said she’d like to hire an editor to take out the parts about the family. That was my first red flag; she actually found someone.

I did a one woman show about her and about the family and I think she felt like the book must be far more detailed. I never thought of her as someone who cared so much about people knowing about her private life, but apparently she’s really private, or oversensitive about being written about. I think she felt like her privacy had been invaded and that I would somehow make her seem like a bad mother, but really it’s a valentine to her.

We had a long crazy conversation where she said, “This is what I get for being a good mother.”

I said, “It’s all about how great you are as a mom, it is.” I’ve been sending her all these dark memoirs, like Running with Scissors, telling how bad their parents were. “Look what it could’ve been.”

RKB: What do you mean about the book being a valentine to her?

WS: It’s like the drug test [where her mother procured a meeting with the head of NFL drug testing on Spero’s behalf]. My mother is just so selfless that once again, despite her personal problems with being rewritten about in a memoir, she’s being so absurdly supportive.

I asked if she wanted to be in the audio book, so she came and we did this hilarious recording. She came to the studio extra early, and got really into her Cornish game hen recipe. We were dying in the booth; she has no self-awareness. She went to get water, and you can hear the water pouring, but she spilled it and it was mayhem. “Wendy, we need a paper towel, there are cords, we may be electrocuted.” She’s going on and on and I just sort of stopped and looked at the producer and he looked up at me and gave me this big thumbs up, like “we’ve got gold.” The audio ends with her just freaking out about water spilling in the booth. It’s so great, cause this very non-James Frey moment. I’d just told this whole story and she validated everything I’d ever written about her in that moment. It was really genius.

Now she’s so interested in doing publicity for the book with me. She’s sending me books on mothers and daughters so we’re “prepared for The View” and I’m like, “ I don’t know if we can get on The View, but I’ll pitch us together.”

There’ve been people calling us about doing a mother/daughter advice show. She’s really into it; she’s getting her nails done. She has this reluctant enthusiasm about the book that’s very funny. I think she’s nervous that one of her patients might read it and that would break the boundary between the therapist and the patient. It was the greatest moment [of the book tour] at Barnes and Noble when a couple came up to me and asked me to sign my book. “We’re her patients,” they said and I wrote “Good luck with the therapy.” They were like, “Don’t tell your mother we’re here. We know she has boundaries, but we’re big fans. See you at your next performance.” It was her ultimate nightmare.

RKB: How do you see the balance between making fun of her quirks and expressing your love for her?

WS: All the stories are about her being this very selfless mother. So she’s a character-she doesn’t change light bulbs, we lived in the dark for 10 years, the clutter grows exponentially, even now. When I was at home during book tour, I was overwhelmed by validation living in that house for two weeks. But she did everything she’s ever done so that I would be happier. Despite the fact that she’s incredibly conservative and doesn’t believe in drugs, when I called her in a panic when I was having a drug test done that I might not pass, she was like “I’m on it.” She ended up getting a meeting with the head of drug testing with the NFL and spent a day researching and gave up her workday to devote her life to me passing a drug test. It was this consistent thing throughout my life where she does everything for me. She’s not even aware of what she’s doing. She doesn’t understand how funny it is while she’s doing it.

I wrote an Esquire article about giving a blowjob in a handicap bathroom at my boyfriend’s job. I have this great voicemail message [which you can listen to here] she left about how she was happy my boyfriend had gotten a promotion. “Now Sue picked up a copy of Esquire and when she asked if the part about the blowjob was true, I said, ‘of course not, that’s a story.’ Anyway, we’ll talk to you next week.” She was so supportive and even though she’s a sex therapist, she thought that was going a little too far, but she was blinded by the excitement of me being in Esquire.

I wasn’t sure . . . is it wrong to play a voicemail of my mother droning on about something to audiences of 80 people in New York? Is that mean? It comes across as so supportive and adorable. It makes her the perfect comic figure because she has no idea why she’s funny.

She once agreed to perform with me at an Eating It [comedy] show in New York in front of 300 people. Each comic was given a minute to perform. She agreed to do it, and she read a few of my jokes and she just killed.

And she’s reading things like, “My mom’s a sex therapist so on take your daughter to work day I hooked up with two guys. Have you ever been so stoned that you experience the evening’s events from the bong’s point of view?”

She’s not aware of what she’s reading, but afterwards she said, “I could’ve been up there for hours.” She wanted to expand the bit.

Now she’s really excited to do a mother daughter sex talk show. Never in a million years would I have dreamed to do a sex talk show with my mother, but it might be too funny to pass up.

My grandmother’s 99 and reads 3 books a day. There’s a chapter in the book about her, and I felt that she wouldn’t think it was funny, about how I found a video of her doing a striptease when she was 25 and her fainting at my bat mitzvah.

Now I have to go and bind a special copy of the book without that chapter in it just for her. I’m just waiting for the relatives to call. I don’t have a plan.

RKB: Do you care?

WS: Kind of. My grandmother and I did have a long theoretical discussion about masturbation; she thought it was inappropriate that I’d written about masturbation, because that’s something men do a lot and they’re very ashamed of and if I mentioned it, it would be upsetting to the men reading the book. I told her it’s a generational thing. I talk about masturbation in the context of my father; I found a diary he’d written in high school. The joke wasn’t meant to put down my father in any way; it was symbolically linking us. I was talking about how my mother’s a sex therapist and how I live in a specific, quirky world, and he also, it appears, lived in a similar way; she didn’t take it that way.

My mom insisted we bind the book without that chapter. There’s this family panic, but it’s all just a lot of sweet people doing some quirky stuff.

RKB: Microthrills was a one-woman show before it became the book. What was the process of creating the book like, and how much of it came directly from the show?

WS: One of the chapters in the book was the show, but I didn’t translate verbatim. The show became one of the chapters but then I had about 230 pages to write additionally, I was in a panic on a daily basis that I didn’t have enough to say.

I’ve always been very scared of writing. I wrote a lot in college but it was always very academic, not creative writing. I associated it with deadlines and a thesis. I have a lot of anxiety with writing; even with the show, the writing part was the scariest part.

I really was a mess for a year and I don’t really know how it happened. I would think about all the stories that I’d told through the years. It’s sort of a rolodex in my mind and when things happened that were salient or memorable or compelling they’d log themselves in my mind; every day was about trying to access them. That process was horrifically scary, I would write a chapter and I’d be like “…aaaaand done. That’s my life, there’s nothing more to say.” And then I’d read Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott and I’d feel a little better, then I’d try to write again. As someone who likes to perform, I felt like I was bombing. I just spent all day, every day, bombing. There’d be no audience to laugh or react. I felt like I was spending far too much time by myself.

It also felt self-indulgent in a way that the show hadn’t. I constantly felt like “So what? Why is what I have to say important? Why would anyone want to read this?” I entered a new realm of paranoia that I hadn’t experienced before but I just kept saying to myself, “Just make it honest and pretend you’re talking to somebody.” I wanted to make it as conversational as possible.

So in many ways it was scarier than doing standup, but it’s become a more rewarding experience because I feel like you’re able to create a kind of humor that’s poignant and touching and more honest. You’re more vulnerable.

RKB: Are your more confident with your writing now?

WS: Yeah, I guess. I still have a fear of writing, but I’m a little less afraid. When you do a show, you’re like, maybe I was sick and I had sinus problems or the weather was bad. You can blame [various factors] for why the show went bad. “This was the best you could do.” I almost want a disclaimer: “I could’ve one better if I had another year.”

I felt a little more vulnerable with the writing because it felt like it’s down on paper, it’s not evolving. When you do a show, you can say, it’s better now, come back and see it. The paranoia of putting stuff out there with a book is a whole other thing. Do you feel that way with writing?

RKB: I do, but then I just have to forget about it basically because there isn’t really anything you can do about it.

WS: You have to let it go, but it’s very cathartic to have it down on paper, all these thoughts and memories. It was very cathartic to have them logged officially; you don’t feel as alone with them.

RKB: Did you have a certain audience in mind when you wrote it?

WS: I thought that maybe people who were a similar age, from the same generation, especially females, might appreciate it more because they’d get some of the references from the 80’s. It’s interesting because I went to a book reading and there were a few 12-year-olds that were really into the book. I actually feel like people who don’t read would like the book (laughs). I’ve always been scared of reading and writing because they remind me of school. It’s a little less literary, I don’t know if that’s bad to say. I think that those who are afraid of reading or don’t like reading might like the book because it’s a little like a conversation. It’s fundamentally a story about a family, about a mother/daughter relationship. Mothers seem to like it, even though I hadn’t thought about that.

RKB: Jeanette Walls say that memoirs should be universal in that they should be relatable. It’s not that someone’s going to share every detail, but more identify with the overall theme; for me, it was the theme of single mom and daughter. I gave a copy to my mom.

WS: It can be an intense relationship in small families or single parent families. The stuff I enjoyed the most was about when I was little, trying to remember being with my mother and following her around and going shopping and being dragged on errands and the monotony of that experience, trying to find amusement in those scenarios.

My whole goal in life seems to be about trying to get back to the way I was when I was little. When I was really little, I was a creative person. I did a lot of performing and I danced around and collected stuffed animals and I ate a lot of candy. I was always a nervous person but I took creative risks as a little kid and when I entered high school and college was very much of the mindset that I had to become a businesswoman or lawyer or doctor.

Since I graduated college, it’s been an attempt to become a little kid again. When you have a book or do a show, you end up seeing all the people from your entire life. Those who knew me when I was very little are like, “You’re the same,” but people from high school and college don’t even recognize me.

RKB: Do you know about this book Rejuvenile? It’s by this guy Christopher Noxon, and it’s about adults who tap into childlike interests, like there’s a professional skipper. I think you’d be into it.

WS: I have to get it.

RKB: He’s sort of saying that it’s about reclaiming this joyous part of ourselves that we tend to lose as we become adults and that reminds me of you and your candy and stuffed animals.

WS: I’ve gotten to the point where I’m just so into toys now. I go to a toy store and I just remember the feeling of when you were so psyched to be in there. I remember feeling disappointed that I wasn’t as psyched as I used to be so I went ahead and purchased a bunch of Lego’s and made the things. The toys in my apartment have grown exponentially.

I just got married, and when I was at the wedding, there were all these little kids there. I wanted to talk to them and say, “You don’t understand, I’m one of you.” When I was a little kid, I would see the bride and be like, “These are grownups, it’s this really grownup event.” I remember at the wedding I wanted to tell them, “No, no, I’m a kid still, don’t think that I’m one of them.”

RKB: How does Amos [Spero’s husband] feel about that? Is he like that too?

WS: I think he appreciates that quality and he matches it if necessary.

I had a vision of us having a teenage boy. This little kid would grow up psyched because there’s all these stuffed animals in the house and then all of a sudden he’d be 12 and be like, “This is retarded, why do we have to live like this?” I had a vision of a fight with a teenage son about why it was necessary to have stuffed animals in the living room and him being embarrassed to have his friends over.

Amos goes there with me a lot. I don’t think I could be with a guy who didn’t do stuffed animal voices. It’s not just the voices, he knows their personalities. I think a lot of people have stuffed animals and won’t admit it. I got home late at night from the book tour. We were about to go to the wedding, and he had set up the stuffed animals under a chuppah.

I tried to make the wedding like a kid party. There was drawing and bubbles and crayons because I was upset that the kids would think I was an adult. I don’t know why I’m so afraid to be a grownup; it’s a little like Peter Pan, I guess.

RKB: What are you going to do after you’re done with the book?

WS: I don’t know. Some people have said it would make a good movie and I have a couple meetings about that. But I feel scared. I’ll think, “I could never write a screenplay,” but that’s exactly how I felt with the book. I was insistent that I couldn’t write a book before this. Every step of my career thus far, I’ve never known what was next. Every time I planned too much, something happened that I never thought was in the realm of possibility.

My friend Jesse and I wrote a pilot for HBO which happened at the exact same time as the book. The pilot was based on a job that I had. I was a bad assistant. I worked for this important corporate guy, and I did what I thought I did best: trying to spice up the office. I’d take glitter and sprinkle it on his budget reports and put sticky candy in his folders; he’d wander around covered in glitter. It’s about the relationship between a stiff older corporate man and his young assistant, like Mary Tyler Moore meets Sex and the City.

RKB: You moved to LA after living in New York your whole life. What do you like the best about it?

WS: I really can’t get sick of buying in bulk. I’m a little person, so I’ve never been able to carry a lot at once. You have to decide between the detergent and the juice in New York. In LA, it’s so cool to be able to load in massive amounts of water and canned foods and bags and bags of heavy candy into the trunk of the car.

RKB: Do you plan to stay out there?

WS: I don’t know. I would really love to move back to New York. I’ve never been able to see New York objectively, it was necessary for me to leave to see it as an objective place and appreciate it even more than I did, but I’d love to move back. I wish a lot of the performing and acting stuff wasn’t in LA. But I’m still getting a kick out of LA.

Read an excerpt from Microthrills.
Visit Wendy Spero's Web site.
Buy The Book!

Rachel Kramer Bussel is a freelance writer, editor, and blogger. She writes the Lusty Lady column for The Village Voice, is Senior Editor at Penthouse Variations, and hosts In The Flesh Erotic Reading Series. Her many erotic anthologies include Naughty Spanking Stories from A to Z 1 and 2, Caught Looking: Erotic Tales of Voyeurs and Exhibitionists, and Ultimate Undies: Erotic Stories About Underwear and Lingerie, with more on the way. Rachel also conducts interviews for Gothamist.com and Mediabistro, reviews books for BUST and The New York Post, and blogs about cupcakes.