Taylor Tomlinson's first book is a list of opinions she has reversed, and she names the one she never will
Taylor Tomlinson has spent fifteen years telling audiences exactly what she thinks about God, therapy, dating and her own family, with the certainty of someone who has worked the bit out on stage. Her first book is a list of the times she got it wrong, and one position she says she will defend to the grave.
Actually, Nevermind: Essays arrives on Tuesday from Gallery Books, at $32. Tomlinson spent Monday morning on TODAY talking about the book and about leaving late night, and the tour opens the same night it goes on sale, at Merkin Concert Hall in New York. That date is sold out. So is the Seattle-area stop and the Los Angeles signing in October.
It is not a special transcribed onto paper. Gallery is selling it as original autobiographical essays, and Tomlinson's own description of the project is narrower and stranger than a memoir: a catalogue of positions she has abandoned.
She also names the exception. "None of us are set in stone and I hope this book will remind people that we can change our opinions at any time," she writes on her site — "except about 'morning people,' I will die on that hill."
The material the book is revisiting
Tomlinson has four Netflix hours in six years: Quarter-Life Crisis in 2020, Look At You in 2022, Have It All in 2024 and Prodigal Daughter in February 2026. In between she hosted CBS's After Midnight from January 2024 until the show ended in June 2025. The subjects those hours keep returning to are Christianity, mental health, dating and her own family — which is to say the exact ground a book about changing your mind has to cross.
"I want to explore all the topics I've changed my mind about — both the serious and the ridiculous — that will no doubt make me look like the self-aware (and occasionally wise) idiot that I am." — Taylor Tomlinson
The origin story is the part that makes the premise land. Tomlinson started doing stand-up at 16 because her father signed the two of them up for a class together. She worked church basements, school halls and coffee shops. At 19 she decided it was the career, and she eventually left California State University San Marcos to do it full time, having already moved colleges once to be nearer the clubs.
The rest of the biography is in every special. Her mother died of cancer in August 2002, when Tomlinson was eight; her father remarried a year later; she and three younger siblings grew up in a devout Christian household in Temecula. Prodigal Daughter puts that upbringing in the title, which is roughly the distance she has travelled from the church basements.
- Sep 22 — Merkin Concert Hall, New York (sold out)
- Sep 23 — Sixth & I Historic Synagogue, Washington DC
- Sep 24 — Athenaeum Center for Thought and Culture, Chicago
- Sep 25 — Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, Washington (sold out)
- Oct 2 — book signing, Los Angeles (sold out)
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Why a book and why now
The timing is tight rather than casual. The book lands seven months after her fourth special and fifteen months after her late-night show finished, while the Nobody Asked You To Do That tour is still running. A comedian who has just stopped hosting five nights a week has, for the first time in two years, a long stretch in which the work is not being delivered out loud.
The blurbs come from people who have watched the stand-up rather than read the essays. Jason Zinoman of The New York Times, quoted on Tomlinson's own page for the book, calls her the rare stand-up with mass appeal in a fragmented landscape, and says she makes heavy subjects seem spikily funny. NPR's word for her is "fearless."
"One of the most acclaimed, in-demand superstars of comedy, the rare stand-up with mass appeal in the current fragmented landscape." — Jason Zinoman, The New York Times
What none of that settles is the thing the premise invites: which opinions, and how far back. A comic who has been on record since 2010 has fifteen years of stated positions to choose from, and the ones worth reversing in public are rarely the ones about morning people.
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