When someone is given the news that they might have a life-threatening illness, you would expect them to react with tears, terror and despair. When comedian Tova Leigh was asked to come back for further tests after a mammogram, she responded by booking a bungee jump.

To be fair, she did experience the tears, terror and despair, but these were quickly followed by a strong desire to throw herself off a cliff, attached to nothing but a giant elastic band.
“My feeling was ‘I’ve got to do it all now. What am I waiting for?’ Thankfully, it all turned out fine, but that feeling of life being fragile stayed with me.” The result was a long bucket list, ranging from dyeing her hair pink to completing the Everest Base Camp trek. Bungee jumping was the first thing she ticked off.

But, as she writes in her 2021 book, F*ckd at 40, a moving and sometimes hilarious memoir of losing and then rediscovering herself after becoming a mother, the aim wasn’t just to fulfil long-held fantasies, but “to reconnect with me”.

At the time, she was in “the trenches of motherhood”, with three toddlers to look after, following a difficult pregnancy with twins. “It was joyous, but it was also very, very challenging. I felt very guilty for having these complicated and mixed emotions.”

Unable to share her feelings with those closest to her, she vented her frustrations in an article on her Facebook page called: I love my kids, but sometimes I just wish they would f*ck off! Perhaps unsurprisingly, it resonated with lots of people and went viral.

While Leigh certainly wasn’t the only mother who felt ambivalent about motherhood, she was one of the few who was prepared to admit it. “I was honest about how I was feeling and through that, people were able to say: ‘I think I’m a loving parent and I love my children, but at the same time, I also feel X, Y and Z.’” The article became the first post on her popular blog, My thoughts about stuff.

Tova Leigh 0468 photo by steve ullathorne (3) (1)

Tova Leigh (Photo: Steve Ullathorne)

Leigh soon realised that the voices having the biggest impact online were the vloggers, so she started creating videos about motherhood, including the belly-achingly funny Veteran Mom vs New Mom. “My page just exploded. It was an overnight thing.”

She feels that part of the problem is the expectations placed on mothers — whether by mothers themselves or wider society —“to be perfect, and then how much we allow ourselves to be flawed and make mistakes.”

“As mums, we take all the good stuff for granted and we ponder a lot about the bad stuff. Dads are much better at going: ‘Oh yeah, I did really well today.’”

She laughs when she recalls how she and her husband, Mike, had diametrically opposed responses to the same parenting experience. “I walked away feeling awfully guilty and like I’m the worst parent in the world and he walked away like he was the best parent in the world.”

With her children now aged nine and 11, Leigh says she has come to a place of acceptance. “It took me a while because for a long time, I was trying to be a different type of mother. But I know that I’m a good mother, I just don’t like baking.”

The Israeli-born 46-year-old now makes a career — and a successful one at that — out of saying what most people are too afraid to say. She has 1.1 million followers for her thoughts on motherhood, women’s rights, body image, sexuality and relationships.
Leigh’s USP is that she has the ability to take a thorny subject and use humour to smooth the edges and open up conversations.

She can be serious too. And angry. But she is frustrated about how negatively anger is viewed in women. “When women express anger, rage and jealousy, which are really very human emotions, they very quickly become villains in the story. It’s very damaging.”

Leigh was shocked at the way the recent libel trial that Johnny Depp brought against Amber Heard was received on social media. She wrote that “misogyny is deeply rooted in our society and victim blaming, as well as discrediting women, are effective tools used to silence us.”

The post led to Leigh being, as she later wrote, “lynched by a virtual mob”. While the internet is in many ways her bread and butter, it doesn’t allow for genuine debate. “Where’s nuance? Where’s the art of conversation? Why do we have to pick a side in that really binary way that actually doesn’t promote bridging gaps?’”

Leigh herself has spent her life “bridging gaps”. She was born to an Israeli father and an Irish mother who converted to Judaism, and split her childhood between school in Israel and summers in Ireland with her Catholic cousins. “I never really felt like I had a solid root.”

Not that this bothers her. Instead, in an accent which sounds American (“I think the accent came from TV!”), but which has Israeli and British twangs, she says she loves the idea of being “a citizen of the world”. In a month’s time, the family is moving to Portugal because “life is short. I have always been happy just to take a case and go”.

Perhaps it is this ability to fit in easily with different people and places which makes Leigh such a talented actress. But growing up, the plan (or at least her father’s plan) was that she would become a lawyer. She toed the line until 30, when she quit her job as an attorney and moved to London to study at leading drama school, Mountview.

Her upcoming show, You Did What? is a spin-off from her recent book of the same name. Leigh continues with the theme of mentioning the unmentionable. In this case, confessions.
This idea for the book and the show came about when some years ago, she began “hosting” virtual pyjama parties on Facebook for new parents.

“We would have a drink together and people would send in their confessions. Apart from it being really funny, what everybody realised was that we all have similar secrets and that was a great relief to a lot of people.”

The book’s confessions include the mother who, after losing her youngest son’s tooth, put one that had come out of her older son’s mouth some years before under his pillow and the wife who told her husband her pneumonia was still contagious (despite having received the all-clear), so she could spend the holiday season watching films in bed while he did all the cooking.

Leigh won’t be drawn on her favourite confessions — “People will need to come to the show!” — but says that she will spend a lot of the evening fessing up to her own misdemeanours. “The whole point of the night is to say that things usually sound worse to us in our heads, and once you get them out, you can cope with them. You can feel less alone.”

jw3.org.uk/whats-on/tova-leigh-you-did-what-0