Mortification is 'a professional confessional for comedy'

Mark Watson is to publish his first memoirs, following their previous release as an audiobook.

Mortification: Eight Deaths And Life After Them – which was was originally released as an Audible Original in 2021 – will now be out in hardback and e-book this August. 

Publisher Francesca Main, from Phoenix, said she was proud to be publishing the book, which Watson ‘has poured heart and soul into’. Writing on Twitter she added: ‘It's very funny, very honest and very moving. It's also an eye-opening peek behind the scenes of stand-up gigs and TV shows - a professional confessional for comedy.’

Watson said: ‘The main question people always ask about being a comedian is what it’s like when you die on stage. Across 20 years in this business I’ve had any number of deaths: some of them in shows, some of them a lot more serious.

‘This book is an attempt to reckon with the many setbacks, disappointments and embarrassments I’ve been through and the way my brain has often tortured me over them, and to put some of the lessons learned into writing, for myself as much as for other people. 

‘That said, I really hope some other people read it, otherwise I could just have sat in a room muttering to myself rather than going to the effort of writing it all down.’

The publisher’s description of the title reads: ‘Mark Watson is generally accepted to be alive. And yet he’s died many times. Not just on stage –though he’ll tell you about that – but in other ways, too. There’s been the death of a childhood dream. The death of his panel-show career. And then there was the time he died inside and nearly lost it all…"

‘Eye-opening, revealing and painfully funny, this is a book about mortification, failure and all the times life doesn’t work out as planned. But it also wisely questions whether the things we strive for –recognition, success, the approval of others – are really the things that matter. It’s a book about death that reminds us how to live.’

» Read our 2021 review of the audiobook

• Mortification: Eight Deaths And Life After Them by Mark Watson will be published by Phoenix on August 17, priced £18.99 in hardback and £10.99 on Kindle. Order below or from Amazon.

Published: 19 May 2023