Michael Ian Black Bares It All In New Memoir ‘Navel Gazing’

Michael Ian Black, the film and TV comedy actor, gets personal in his new memoir – Navel Gazing: True Tales of Bodies, Mostly Mine (But Also My Mom’s, Which I Know Sounds Weird).

Michael Ian Black Memoir

Black decided to use his memoir to, among other things, delve into the realities of male vanity – something that he personally deals with regularly, particularly as an actor. When he’s not in front of the camera, Black’s confrontations with his own image, he imagines, are similar to what a woman experiences.

“I think women are probably the same, all I see are the imperfections. I see that my nose runs off to the side of my face; I see that one eyebrow cocks upwards no matter what I do to try to correct it,” he told NPR Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “Inevitably I’ll wake up and there will be some blemish on my face that wasn’t there the day before. My stomach, which continues to expand. My arms, which continue to be noodley and flaccid. Like, it’s everything.”

As for his mother’s body, Black discusses how it’s changed as her various illnesses have progressed over the last 15 years. Black had assumed that since her health has been failing for so long that she might be somewhat at peace with the idea of her eventual passing. But, what he learned surprised and saddened him.

“I guess I sort of thought, at a certain point in dealing with constant illness and bodily deterioration, that you make some accommodations with death, and she hasn’t. When I asked her why she felt so terrified of dying, she said, “Because I feel like I haven’t done anything with my life.” And that was such a kind of heartbreaking and startling and upsetting thing to hear from one’s parent,” Black said. “She meant that on a kind of macro-level, in a way of like making a mark on the world or doing something creative or doing something professional that would have some lasting impact on society, and I found it upsetting to hear that she felt that way.”

In a somewhat lighter segment of his interview, Black spoke about how his mother and her then-partner had assumed that he was gay in his earlier teenage years – an assumption based on what Black reflects was a period of his life when he was actively rejecting archetypical masculine behaviors.

“I was probably 13, 14, something like that, and I was mortified and infuriated and it was so presumptuous of them and crossing so many boundaries. I didn’t even know how to respond. I was just sputtering with rage when they said this to me,” Black said. “In retrospect, I get it. I do understand why they thought I may have been gay, and the answers are because I was interested in theater and because my friends were mostly female and because, I don’t know, I maybe expressed myself a certain way or spoke in a certain way.”

Black added, “The way I rebelled was to do things that were sort of anti-masculine. I would cross my legs the way a girl crossed her legs, or I would dress in a way that didn’t conform to the way the guys in my school dressed.”

Black didn’t just read as gay to his mother in his teens. To this day, Black concedes that casting directors are always offering him the parts of gay characters.

“I’m almost always hired to play gay. Like, it’s never left, that whole thing,” said Black who has been married since 1998 to his wife Martha Anne Hagen, with whom he has two children. “My first movie role was in Wet Hot American Summer, where I play a gay counselor. I’ve played gay in so many things…. I can do other things and hopefully people will see me and let me do other things, and they have thankfully, particularly in recent years. But yeah, I always get hired to play gay.”

Navel Gazing: True Tales of Bodies, Mostly Mine (but also my mom’s, which I know sounds weird) is currently available in hardcover.