Comedian Jen Kirkman hits Portland this Saturday with her new book, I Know What I'm Doing—and Other Lies I Tell Myself: Dispatches from a Life Under Construction. I interviewed Kirkman in advance of her local performance, and the preview for that show will be in tomorrow's Mercury. But I couldn't include everything. Here are some gems from our internet conversation that were cut (or seriously pared-down) for space. This interview, too, has been edited and condensed, because as with her book, when it comes to email interviews (which lesser comedians might consider a chance to go skimpy), Jen Kirkman doesn't hold back.

MERCURY: Both your stand-up and I Know What I'm Doing are refreshingly forthright about what it’s like to be an unmarried adult in a country with a thriving wedding industrial complex. Why do you think some people are so uncomfortable with divorced/separated/single women over the age of 30 (or, let’s be real, at any age)?

JEN KIRKMAN: I wish I knew. I think because whenever someone IS something for a period of time—people tend to think that that person is PREACHING that. Since my first book deal came to me in 2011 and I began writing it—up until my second book has been published in 2016, I’ve been separated, officially divorced, sometimes very lonely and scared of burglars, having lots of dates and lovers and thinking that this is the way to go about life for a while, being totally un-partnered and feeling what independence feels like in terms of living, traveling alone and having no one to help me carry my groceries, having a relationship, having a break-up, having a lover, deciding he wasn’t very capable or smart and leaving him, being alone for a while again, working on my issues and taking a break from anything romantic and being in therapy, and falling in love for the first time in years with an Australian, having a long distance relationship, and now I’m back to working on myself and not taking on a relationship for a year.

I wrote all that because I’m hard to define—as all humans are. And when we just dismissively call people “single” it implies that someone is trying and failing to partner up, they are defective, not chosen and none of that is true.

The other thing that annoys me is that people think I’m clutching a bottle of Chardonnay and screaming, “Ladies! Don’t have meaningful relationships! Be alone! Woo party!”

I’m not that either. I’m just a human, and for one thing, my job is highly unpredictable and involves me not being home about 200 days a year. That’s not easy for relationships, but right now it can’t be compromised or I’ll be broke when I’m old... which is way scarier than being alone.

Similarly, we have this sad cultural narrative about single women (like, we must all be living a Cathy ACK! CHOCOLATE! existence). Sometimes I see comedy from women that seems to reinforce this narrative—there are a lot of “poor little old me, I’m only loved by my cat!” jokes out there. How do you gracefully acknowledge the not-optimal parts of not being partnered without sliding into cliché and also being funny? Sometimes the line between “I’m laughing at myself!” and “I’m ACTUALLY Cathy Guisewite!” can seem pretty thin.

Well, I’ve never not been partnered for such a long time that it’s become who I am. And just like I was with the same man and then married to him all total—seven years. That didn’t define me either. I had some jokes about the annoyances of a relationship and for some reason I didn’t get pigeonholed then. Now if I even make a joke about ONE TIME that I was single people stamp me with that.

When I was still married I wrote a few funny jokes about the absurdity of relationships as the thing that “fixes” us—because being in one for me brought more problems. And I told jokes like that years later in my Netflix special and the reaction was overwhelmingly positive, but I still have people thinking I was basically making a tape saying, “Wah I’m single... someone date me.” It’s like again, I’m complex. I wrote that joke when I was married. Performed it for years through all kinds of relationship identities, taped it for Netflix when I happened to be single, it came out on Netflix when I wasn’t single… it’s like they’re just jokes about all the things we go through.

If I wrote a joke about having had a broken leg one time and I performed it, would people look at me up their without a cast and say, “I’m sorry about your leg?” Somehow they can understand that I once had a life experience in an area. When we talk about being single even if it is in the past, people flip out and want to fix it.

But yeah, I’m not much for the, “I’m only loved by my cat,” jokes if they are too clichéd. I think there is something very powerful about women on their own and their jokes should be about how awesome their cat is compared to their ex.