Tig Notaro allowed her emotional breast cancer diagnosis and double mastectomy to be chronicled in the new documentary "Tig," but behind the scenes, the comedian's procedure was being met with a very different reaction.
"I had a few people congratulate me," Notaro recalled in a HuffPost Live conversation on Wednesday. "I guess when you make a decision that's not medical to remove your breasts, it's called top surgery. I wasn't familiar with it, and I'd never wanted that, [but] people congratulated me on my free top surgery."
Notaro, who's long been an out-and-proud lesbian, felt that congrats were out of order.
"I was like, 'I never wanted that -- I'm in a bad place,'" she recounted.
But while the stand-up performer wasn't transitioning in the way others may have assumed, Notaro explained how her surgery did, in fact, lead her to embrace a different mindset.
"More than any sort of gender or sexuality issues, more than anything, I felt back in touch with being a kid," she said. "I didn't have reconstructive surgery, and just lounging around and looking down at myself and seeing a flat t-shirt, I felt like I was 8 again, and so there was kind of this lighter place that I got to. It was a weird transition."
Tig Notaro's stand-up special "Tig Notaro: Boyish Girl Interrupted" airs Saturday, Aug. 22 on HBO.
Watch more from Tig Notaro's conversation with HuffPost Live here.
Sign up here for Live Today, HuffPost Live's new morning email that will let you know the newsmakers, celebrities and politicians joining us that day and give you the best clips from the day before!
Also on HuffPost:
