Judith Lucy cannot get a cold. A few hours before a planned walk around the rose gardens of the St Kilda Botanical Gardens, near her home in Melbourne's south-east, the beloved comedian is on a telehealth call from the front seat of her publicist's car. Her doctor needs to review the previous day's scans to confirm everything is looking good enough to perform the double mastectomy planned for Friday, three weeks after her breast cancer diagnosis. The cancer isn't appearing anywhere else on the scans, she learns, but a compromised immune system going into surgery would throw the whole thing out of whack. So with blustery wind and grey skies at their backs, they retreat into her home instead. The walk up and down the hallway, from the front door of her weatherboard cottage to the neat living room at the back, will have to make do for their very short walk.
Lucy opens the door holding hospital paperwork, stapled stacks of invoices and forms. When asked how she is, she warbles, “Well, I've got cancer!” with that unmistakable intonation she has delivered punchlines in for her entire career.
Why she went public
For all her openness – in interviews and on social media – Lucy wasn't planning on sharing her cancer with the world. But the diagnosis landed a week before the release date for her latest book, Well Well Well … My Wellness Odyssey – a book years in the making. Initially envisioned as a romp through Lucy's life spent dabbling in experimental therapies, spiritual rites and the wacky stuff that can serve as punchline or revelation, the hard-working performer suddenly found herself suffering from severe burnout. Lucy had announced her retirement from standup in 2022 and moved back to her home town of Perth. Once burnout set in, the remedies in the book that had started as good material were suddenly necessary for a woman genuinely searching for a way to feel a bit more well.
“If it hadn't been for the book, I probably wouldn't have [talked about the cancer],” she says. “I would almost certainly have come out the other side and then done a show about it.” But a rapidly impending book release requires you to talk, and Lucy is such a self-confessed “big mouth” it never could have stayed a secret. “I was never going to pretend … So now look out Australia, you're going to hear more than you bargained for!”
More than you bargained for coming from the person who has been thoroughly documenting the process of undergoing faecal transplants is quite something. She is a live wire, launching herself off the couch, all limbs and gravity-defying curls, to spread herself across the floor to paint a picture of how that procedure required her to drag her upper body towards the TV to wait for the daily foot-long syringes of a stranger's poo to do their job. “I remember saying out loud, as you occasionally do when you live on your own, What have I done to deserve this?!”
Three decades of comedy
It would take a lot to stop one of the country's hardest-working comedians. Lucy has barely paused since The Late Show made her a household name in the early 90s: three decades of national standup tours, radio gigs and a run of television and film credits that includes Judith Lucy's Spiritual Journey and a stint as the resident “wellness expert” on The Weekly with Charlie Pickering. She has published three memoirs since 2008 and starred in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days in 2023. “I only had two modes of being: either busy or off my face,” she writes in Well Well Well … “I was a burnout case waiting to happen.”
Lucy offers a drink and starts making herself a cuppa. She has moved all the teabags and cups to a low drawer – after the surgery, reaching the high cupboards won't be possible for a while. There is a sweet pink box on the kitchen counter containing half a dozen tit-themed cupcakes. Iced in pink, each with a raisin on top. “They're gluten-free!” she says, requesting a photo be taken of her holding them up in front of the real thing. “I will do the classy thing of posting this on the day.”
She is feeling quite at peace about only having a couple more days with her breasts. There is no great sense of loss or tragedy and any crumbs of fear she is hiding well. If the choice is between dying and not, she says, what's a couple of boobs? Right now, she is not planning reconstruction. “Even five years ago I probably would have gone for it. But right now – I'm 59 in a minute – I just can't be fucked.”
Turning pain into material
Lucy has built a career on turning pain into material. In Well Well Well she writes: “When I found out that I was adopted, after a horrendous family fight on Christmas Day at the age of twenty-five … I was doing a routine about it within the month. I didn't take time off when my father disowned me by fax and dropped dead six weeks later. Instead, I wrote a show about it and toured it around the country … Many years later, when it turned out that the man I thought I was going to grow old with had been stealing money from me for over two years, once I stopped hyperventilating, I wrote a show about that too.”
Lucy didn't just dive into wellness to research her book – she has spent 20 years trying just about every alternative therapy, psychotropic drug and offering from oddballs with aura cards at Sunday markets. Yes, she sees the comedic potential there but there is also a part of her genuinely looking for answers. “I try to go in with an open mind. There's a little voice of hope in there too, especially when I was feeling pretty terrible, [saying] Maybe this will work. But as soon as it goes to shit, then it's straight into let's write some gags about it.” That was the case for a self-help book she once read that insisted a vagina should be called a “sacred space” and a penis a “wand of light”.
Right now, the thought of having to find the story, the hook, the punchline of her illness – right after navigating a burnout so extreme it made the previous years of constant insomnia, irritable bowel syndrome and chest infections look like a walk in the park – is low on the list of priorities for Lucy. Her commitment to the bit is waning. “My whole life's been really good fucking gear and I'm a bit over getting so much material out of my life. It would be great to have a year or two where I went, ‘I've got nothing to say.’”
Focusing on wellness
With this next innings stretching out in front of her, she is pledging to focus on the greatest hits of wellness: nature, movement, down time, actually spending time with her friends, quieting her mind. “Gosh, there's nothing like hearing the word cancer to make you go, ‘I really do need to be more mindful. I really do need to make the most of every day.’” The days of sacrificing just about anything for work are behind her, she says.
“Because of my Catholic upbringing, I will never be involved with an organised religion. But all of the Buddhist stuff about dealing with the mind just makes damn good sense. The Buddha was big on saying, ‘See for yourself.’ It's all about: you need to work out what your experience is. Don't take anyone's word for it.”
Meditation will stay, too. She has booked herself in for a 10-day silent retreat over Christmas. Unlike the strict and demanding Vipassana she experienced, on camera, for the 2011 ABC series Judith Lucy's Spiritual Journey, this one is a bit more relaxed; you get to go on walks.
Over the next few days, she will take it easy. There is a podiatrist appointment and a bit of “packing and repacking for the glamorous hospital stay”. In between, “with the help of some prescribed and not prescribed THC oil, I have just been doing a lot of staring at walls. That's about it.”
A friend suggested her sequel to Well Well Well be a chronicle of the next part of her life. Call it The Wellness Years, only this time – plot twist – Lucy does get to actually be well. “I was like, ‘That's a good plan. Might not be a very interesting read, but it would be nice to experience.’”
