Mike Birbiglia Books in Order

If you want the full arc: Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories → The New One
If you want the breakthrough book first: Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories
If you want the parenting material first: The New One → Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

Mike Birbiglia was born and raised in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, about 45 minutes outside Boston. He grew up one of four kids, in the kind of family that later became rich material for stories. Home could be warm and funny, but it could also be guarded. That push and pull, between keeping things private and blurting out the truth, is all over his work.

A live Steven Wright set changed the plan.

Birbiglia has said his older brother took him to see Wright when he was a teenager, and the idea of being funny for a living suddenly felt possible. At Georgetown University, where he majored in English and graduated in 2000, he joined the Georgetown Players improv troupe, studied screenwriting and playwriting with John Glavin, and won Georgetown's Funniest Person on Campus contest. That led to performances at the D.C. Improv, and comedy stopped feeling like a hobby.

What makes Birbiglia's writing work is that he does not pretend to be the coolest person in the room. He writes about embarrassment, anxiety, family misunderstandings, bad decisions, and the stories people tell themselves to stay afloat. He has also spoken openly about living with REM sleep behavior disorder, the condition behind his dangerous sleepwalking and one of the central threads in his early work.

He sounds like someone thinking in real time, then realizing the thought is funnier, and sadder, than he expected.

His first book, Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories, grew out of his off-Broadway show of the same name. It pulls together stories about childhood, parents, dating, early comedy jobs, and the sleepwalking episodes that nearly got him killed. The book became a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. The later film version of Sleepwalk With Me, which Birbiglia co-wrote, directed, and starred in, won the NEXT Audience Award at Sundance in 2012.

He has a real gift for taking the thing most people would hide and making it the whole point of the story.

That same honesty runs through The New One, his 2020 memoir about marriage, pregnancy, and becoming a father when he was not at all sure he wanted to be one. The book grew from his Broadway show and includes poems by his wife, Jen Stein, who writes as J. Hope Stein. Their daughter, Oona, was born in 2015, and the book is at its best when Birbiglia lets himself look uncertain, guilty, loving, and very funny all at once.

Even outside the books, the themes stay pretty consistent. In shows like My Girlfriend's Boyfriend, Thank God for Jokes, The Old Man and the Pool, and The Good Life, he keeps coming back to family, fear, aging, faith, and the strange relief that comes from saying the hard part out loud. He has long been a familiar voice on This American Life and The Moth Radio Hour, which makes sense. His work lands best when it feels like a confession that somehow got sharper in the telling.

These days, he is still touring his solo shows around the world, making films and specials, and hosting the podcast Working It Out, where he talks with other comics and artists while the material is still messy.