"Growing apart may indicate healthy growth"

What we asked Rosie Wilby, podcaster, comedian, and author.

Rosie Wilby was on a writer’s retreat with unreliable wifi, working on her first fiction book, when we talked with her for this interview. We talked about her route from stand-up to podcasting to writing The Break-Up Monologues, conscious uncoupling, staging a mock wedding, and her upcoming panel at Margate Bookie…

Rosie Wilby.

What is your official occupation?
Oh my God! Well, I do so many different things. I don’t know whether any of them count as official occupations in the sort of traditional sense that my parents would have believed in having an occupation. But I have been a comedian for many years. Before that, I was a musician. I have been a journalist and latterly I am the author of two humorous books about the psychology of relationships that combine memoir and science and other people’s personal stories. The first one was called Is Monogamy Dead? and now the current book is called The Breakup Monologues. There’s also a podcast of that name, and as you can imagine, it’s all about people’s breakup stories and how we can maybe harness a breakup as an opportunity for growth.

Do you have any additional roles, paid or unpaid?
I’m a patron of a charity called Switchboard. They’re a helpline for LGBTQ+ people. I’ve done a number of different things in my life, but mostly I earn a living from writing, speaking and performing. My work looking at human relationships in comedy shows and then in these humorous books and in my podcasts has then expanded into sometimes offering corporate talks where people, companies want me to go in and talk with a bit of humour about people’s resilience skills. Instead of perhaps talking about your worst breakup ever, maybe your worst ever day at work and how you bounce back from that. The concept that I cover in the Breakup Monologues book, harnessing adversity and then learning from it, is universal and applicable to all types of loss or misfortune. They can be terrible at the time. However, they can be the things, of course, that we learn a great deal from.

Your book, The Breakup Monologues, started as a podcast?
Yes, it almost started as a live show. Initially, it was a show modelled on something like the Vagina Monologues, where different performers would get up on stage and tell a breakup story, and I would compère it. That originally premiered at Bradford Literary Festival back in 2017. However, podcasting was becoming popular around that time. Obviously not as popular as it is now. Everyone’s got a podcast. It was the beginning of the real podcast boom. We started doing it as a type of chat show where I would interview them, almost be their relationship therapist, and we would record those and release them as a podcast.

Rosie Wilby’s The Breakup Monologues.

How did that develop into becoming a book?
Well, it was always something that I wanted to do because I’d already written one book based on one of my comedy shows called Is Monogamy Dead? I really wanted to do another book. And obviously, I was collecting a lot of interesting information, stories, and ideas about breakups. I thought it was just this universal topic that whoever we are, whatever age or whatever our sexual orientation, we’ve probably been through some type of a breakup. It seems something of interest to me, having had quite a few breakups myself.

What would you say have been the key findings regarding people’s breakups?
I think that the important thing that a lot of people have found is that we tend to think of a breakup as really a terrible thing, particularly if we’re the one who gets dumped. But it can actually be this new chapter, a new beginning. It can be a way to find the freedom suddenly to start new projects. And certainly, many of the women, in particular, that I spoke to had perhaps started new careers or pursued dreams that they had had or had put on hold in particular relationships that they were in.