I'm a Lot: Surviving Myself and All the People I've Been - Hardcover

Leiby, Alison

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 059373162X ISBN 13: 9780593731628

Publisher: The Dial Press, 2026

Synopsis

In this witty, absurd, and surprisingly moving memoir-in-essays, comedian Alison Leiby unpacks the multitudes women are told to be—and the joy of refusing to pick just one.

“Alison Leiby is the Jewish millennial David Sedaris. Reading this book was like having a glass of wine with your funniest, smartest, and coolest friend.”—Bess Kalb, author of Nobody Will Tell You This But Me

Have you ever frozen when someone asks, “So, tell me about yourself?” If so, take a page from I'm a Lot. Alison Leiby proudly embraces the identities we’re often encouraged to hide: Housewives stan. Discount shopaholic. Former jock. Happily single. Childless by choice and proud cat mom. Through these different roles and identities, Leiby reveals her hard-earned wisdom about what it’s like to be a woman who does it all (except for the things that make her say “uh, no thank you”).

When she was nineteen years old, a complication from back surgery left Leiby on her deathbed. After a surprising recovery, you might assume Leiby was ready to seize life by the you-know-whats. But instead of letting this one miraculous experience define her, Leiby’s brush with death made her realize there is nothing more beautiful in this life than just getting to be yourself. And while women are still expected to conform to many patriarchal labels, Leiby ignores the pressure to be palatable and instead champions all the joyful, weird, and complicated selves she brings to the world.

In fourteen personal essays full of deadpan jokes, tender moments of candid introspection, and insightful social commentary, Leiby encourages us to ditch the manufactured Instagram persona and embrace the fact that sometimes the puzzle pieces don’t always fit to create a perfect picture, but that doesn’t mean we are incomplete.

About this title

About the Author

Alison Leiby is a two-time WGA Award–nominated writer. She has written for Life & Beth, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and The President Show, and was a writer and executive producer for Ilana Glazer’s Comedy on Earth for Comedy Central. Her critically acclaimed solo show Oh God, A Show About Abortion, which ran at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York, was named the Best Political Comedy of the year by The New York Times. Alison’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York magazine, McSweeney’s, Vice, The Onion, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, and many others. Her podcast Ruined has been named one of Time magazine’s top ten podcasts of the year.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I’m Not Dead

I don’t really celebrate my birthday.

It’s not because I’m on some kind of high horse about being the center of attention (for one thing, I would never be on a horse). It’s because my birthday is a few days before Christmas, and growing up, my birth got overshadowed by Jesus’s. And I don’t mean “the holidays,” I mean Christmas specifically. Hanukkah has never overshadowed anything; in fact, it’s the kind of holiday you can quickly celebrate when you get home from going out to dinner as long as someone stays awake for thirty-five minutes. But Christmas, with all its travel and family time, made it impossible for me to celebrate my own birthday. So instead, I throw an I’m Not Dead party.

Rather than celebrating the anniversary of my birth, I celebrate the anniversary of the time I didn’t die. Technically, every day is that day, but I also have a more specific date that I honor every August. For many years, this entailed finding a bar in Lower Manhattan, hanging there with all my mismatched friends, and drinking way too many whiskey sodas with the occasional toasts to me not being dead. Sure, it’s kind of macabre and depressing to some, but it’s my party and I’ll be a weird bummer if I want to!

I celebrate because when I was nineteen years old, I almost died from complications following my first back surgery. Different people use “almost died” in their own ways, but I want to be very clear: I was absolutely supposed to die, and it was only through a complete freak encounter that I was able to get treatment and survive. I know this not because I was super aware of the medical details of the ordeal, but because the few memories I do have are of doctors telling me I wasn’t going to make it. And because in all my appointments after, I was talked to like a survivor. And not the Destiny’s Child version of a survivor who’s not gonna give up, who’s gonna work harder. I was talked to like I had achieved something, somehow. Nurses would read my chart and say, “Wow, great job getting through that, you did it.” Did what? I didn’t save my own life. I didn’t will my body to heal itself. “You’ve really been through something!” started to feel a bit like when a waiter tells you “Excellent choice” after you order a chicken Caesar salad. Complimentary but meaningless.

The summer after my freshman year at Cornell was set to be a great one for me. I’d had a stellar year on the rowing team as a recruit out of high school, I had a great group of friends I was eager to go back to, and I had landed on the incredibly lucrative major of English literature. Now I was back in my hometown and most of my high school friends were returning to Maryland for a few months to throw house parties and work outdoor jobs. Gone were my freewheeling nights of no curfews and ample keg beer with about as much carbonation as a pond. I was under my parents’ roof, away from my college friends and dining hall of myriad brunch options. But I was excited to be home, see a few friends, train for the fall rowing season, and make a little bit of money that I could spend on a pair of Seven jeans with just the right wash to wear when I hit campus in August.

I was set up with the perfect summer gig: counselor for the U.S. Naval Academy girls’ rowing camp. Four weeks with my best friend and high school coxswain making sure tween and teen girls didn’t get in trouble on the campus of our country’s most beautiful military college. Despite growing up minutes from the Naval Academy and rowing by it every day for four years, I’ve never been a fan. I grew up in a pretty liberal family with no military connection and spent my teens with zero interest in tucking in my shirt. Plus, I was grossed out when midshipmen (Naval Academy students) were girls’ dates at my prom. But I was willing to put my pacifism aside for free meals, a slumber party with my funniest friend, and basically getting paid to row for hours. My job was to do my favorite thing, and also to occasionally slip an embarrassed fourteen-year-old a tampon in the middle of lunch.

Rowing was all I wanted to do with my time. I loved it more than anything. Though it feels ridiculous to say I did anything for a “long” time before I turned fifteen, I had been swimming competitively for the majority of my life, and when I quit the team at the start of high school, I was in search of a new identity. While I loved the rhythm of it, swimming was an isolating endeavor, where I was alone amid the white noise of being underwater and in every win and every loss. Rowing, on the other (very calloused) hand, is a team sport whose camaraderie transcends any group activity short of an orgy. The second I grabbed the gunwale of a fiberglass 8+, I was hooked.

Rowing in high school was one thing, but continuing in college was more than just a level up. I went from belonging to a rowing club outside of my high school to being handed hundreds of dollars of Cornell University Athletics merch to proudly wear on and off the water. We had trainers, we had nutritionists, we had more Big Red gear than Clifford. I was proud to wear my Cornell Rowing sweatshirt while I gently fell asleep in my medieval literature seminar. I loved “closing down” the dining hall with my teammates and best friends, on our fourth bowls of cereal after a full dinner while we scream-laughed to inside jokes that I couldn’t explain even if I wanted to. Rowing was who I was on campus, and it was who I was when I returned home that summer.

But toward the end of the first month of camp, I started feeling pain in my back and legs. This wasn’t new, really; back and leg pain is standard for a lot of rowers, along with having hands and heels that look like the inside of a nineties Coach bag. Rowing is tough on your back. Most people picture rowers just sitting in a boat facing forward, like you would in a kayak or a canoe, but you actually sit backward and have to strap your feet into shoes on a plank, and then you sit on a seat that moves back and forth on tracks. You use your legs, then your back, and then finally your arms to pull the oar back before you pop it out of the water and slowly glide back up to do it again thousands of times. So yes, my back had hurt before. I chalked this pain up to overdoing it with my all-day-every-day workout schedule, plus sleeping on a one-inch-thick foam mattress in a military dorm every night like a future nautical killing machine.

But the pain continued. Thank god my parents were still responsible for me (and I was still on their insurance). My mom insisted we make an appointment with an orthopedic doctor, which I was wary of but also looked forward to in a way. All of my medical experiences in life so far had involved a discrete problem with a clear solution. Until this point, if something was wrong with me medically, it got fixed. I broke my collarbone, they put me in a sling until it healed. I had trouble with my tonsils, they took them out and I was good to go. Wisdom teeth started coming in, we got those bad boys out of there and then I lost three pounds from not eating solids.

I assumed this time around would be no different. Maybe I’d get a shot or some high-level vitamins to take, and then I’d be pain-free. Plus, in my mind, my nineteen-year-old body was invincible. So I was expecting solutions, not major diagnoses, as my mom and I drove to the hospital in Annapolis, to the Sajak Pavilion. I learned a lot during this experience, but perhaps my greatest lesson was to be wary of doctors in medical complexes named after climate-change-denying game-show hosts. This was also my first time being in the waiting room of a doctor’s office that wasn’t geared toward me. Instead of the tween mags of my orthodontist or the Highlights and coloring books of my pediatrician, my new doctor favored issues of Golf World. There’s an unsettling feeling about being not old enough to legally drink yet expected to entertain yourself with AARP: The Magazine.

My doctor looked at my MRI while I looked at his adult braces. It felt like we were both in the wrong era of our lives, medically speaking. He explained that I had a herniated disc between the L4 and L5 vertebrae in my lower back, and described how in between each of your bones there is a soft, cushiony disc of tissue that allows you to bend, as well as absorbs the shock of walking, running, biking, falling, basically any physical activity that causes impact. Over time, these discs can dry out, and can break or bulge, often ending up getting pushed back into your spinal column, the tube of nerves for your entire body. That was why I was feeling pain in my back that also radiated down through my legs, he told me. This typically happened with age, but I had degenerative disc disease, so my discs might herniate early and easily, and this one seemed to be the first to go.

Edition details

• Publisher: The Dial Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 059373162X
• ISBN 13: 9780593731628
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304