Stephanie Allynne and Tig NotaroIllustration by João Fazenda
Ten years ago, Stephanie Allynne went to an audition for an animated show. In the waiting room, she overheard one of the other actors, a thin woman with delicate features and cropped hair, say, “Whenever a director comes up to give me a note, I say, ‘Before you give me a note, I just have to tell you, I have no range. But go ahead. What were you going to say?’” Allynne thought this was so funny that she went over to the sign-in sheet and found the woman’s name: Tig Notaro.
Notaro, whose given name is Mathilde, is a bone-dry standup from a French family in Mississippi. Her brother dubbed her Tig. When people avoid addressing her by name, she knows why: they’re afraid that her name might be Pig. She and Allynne got married in 2015. Now they co-write, co-direct, co-create, and co-parent. Their sons, Max and Finn, are five; they call Allynne Mom and Notaro Mère. Allynne’s father, who moved in with them during the pandemic, is Papa Grande.
The other day, Notaro and Allynne were at their home, an ivy-covered house in Los Angeles, sitting on a white couch with a giant gray cat, Fluff, between them. (When Notaro uses Instagram, which is not often, it is from the account @therealfluffnotaro.) They had just got home from a Dodgers game. Max and Finn were in the yard with Papa Grande, working on their batting.
Allynne, who has auburn hair and blue eyes, said that, not long after the waiting-room encounter, she and Notaro met for real, on an indie film. “We were kind of funny, small parts in the movie,” Allynne said. Notaro added, “And we played love interests. You should watch it knowing that we later get married, and that I was deathly ill.” Notaro, it turned out, had pneumonia, a severe intestinal infection called C. difficile, and bilateral breast cancer; Allynne was twenty-five and straight.
After Notaro was given her diagnosis, she went onstage at Largo, a club where she does a monthly show, and greeted the audience with “Hello. Good evening, hello. I have cancer. How are you?” It was an electrifying set. She later joked about the revenge that her body was taking on her: after so many years of listening to her talk about being flat-chested, she said, her breasts had got sick of it and decided, “Let’s kill her.” She chose not to get reconstructive surgery.
Notaro and Allynne began a text friendship. “I started bringing my phone to the bathtub—I just didn’t want to miss anything,” Notaro said. Then, on Valentine’s Day, Allynne invited Notaro to meet her at a bar. When Notaro got there, she found that she and Allynne were wearing the same type of chunky-wool cardigan. They traded sweaters and spontaneously kissed. “I’ve never just started kissing somebody in such a public place like that—I would never do that!” Notaro said. “And she’d never kissed a woman.”
The next day: confusion. “I had a little mental crisis,” Allynne said. “I wrote Tig the longest e-mail: ‘I really like you, I liked kissing you, but I just want you to know I am not gay.’”
“On and on and on,” Notaro said.
“Tig wrote back, ‘O.K., dyke.’ And I guess that was kind of it.”
On her new album, “Drawn,” Notaro describes how she knew she wanted to spend her life with Allynne. After a gig in Philadelphia, Notaro was hospitalized, with internal bleeding, and had to have stomach surgery. “We had so many times where I was, like, ‘This is the person,’” Notaro says. “But that particular time... I’m in my little diaper, crinkle, crinkle, as I’m moving, and this is how I knew, Stephanie, I was, like, ‘Ah, she’s the one.’ She was laughing so hard.”
This spring, Notaro’s stepfather—Cowboy Ric, to her kids—died unexpectedly, of C. difficile infection. Max and Finn overheard their mothers talking about burying him next to Notaro’s mother, in the family plot in Mississippi. (Ric inspired a central character in “One Mississippi,” a series that Notaro co-wrote with Allynne and starred in, based on her mother’s sudden death, in 2012.) “I’m neck-deep in grieving,” Notaro said. “And then your child is, like, ‘Wait, we have to bury Cowboy Ric?’ It’s, like, ‘Oh, gosh. Um, yes, we have to bury him.’ ‘Why do we have to bury Cowboy Ric?’ ‘Because he died, and that’s what you do when someone dies, you bury people.’ And he’s, like, ‘In the ground?’ ‘Yeah, in the ground.’ And he’s, like, ‘Well, we can just dig him up whenever we want to, right?’” She paused to consider the ways of kids: “You’re destroyed by your emotions, but you’re also laughing.”♦
