Mandy’s Mister Men Mistakes |

I’m sitting in the kitchen of comedian Mandy Nolan’s Mullumbimby house, which she and her third husband, John Stevens, recently built to house their tribe – Nolan’s eldest two daughters by her first marriage to Rhett Hutchence, (brother of Michael Hutchence), her son Charlie, by her second marriage, John’s daughter, and their daughter, five-year-old Ivy.

We’re discussing one of Nolan’s favourite topics for comedy – men, of course, and more specifically the men Nolan has chosen to spill the beans on in her latest book – Boyfriends We’ve All Had (and Shouldn’t Have) and she’s telling me that yes, it is indeed true, one of her shouldn’t-have-had boyfriends gave her a dress that he’d previously given to another girlfriend, and even worse, the same bottle of perfume.
“I’m a self-confessed gift slut,” she says. “So I didn’t want to look too closely, but it did occur to me it didn’t smell like it should – it seemed watered down, and it hadn’t arrived in a box.”
But it was the Chanel dress that clinched it.
“I wore this gorgeous dress to a party,” she says, “when this woman, much the same height and build as me, came up to me and said: ‘Beautiful dress, I used to have one just like it,’ and as she walked off I could smell the Giorgio perfume.”
Nolan returned the dress, and walked home in her underwear. “It was a dramatic way to end the relationship,” she says, “but it felt good.”
Now happily married to Stevens, she admits that in her wilder years when she was unwittingly ‘researching’ her future book, Stevens would not have even blipped on her radar. “He would have been way too normal for me,” she says. “But I’ve realised that to a greater or lesser extent, all women are in love with love, and it’s in our relationships that women learn and grow. I’ve evolved – and so has he, in fact I would say we found each other at a time when we were ready to actually work on the whole concept of relationships and intimacy.”

There are 20 Mr. Men in the book – Mr. Messy, Mr. Can’t Commit, Mr. Married and Mr. New Age for starters. Having lived in the Byron region of NSW for 25 years, Nolan says there have been plenty of the latter. “I could cope with the hemp pants and crystal amulets but he gets you in the bedroom and there’s 400 candles in there, and then he wants to look in your eyes for hours…and when the sex isn’t up to scratch he says ‘you’re a lesbian aren’t you?’ and I go, ‘well, yes I am now.’” Not for the first time, I can’t help laughing out loud. Her timing, as many of us locals know, is impeccable, and she uses every punchline to great effect – verbal or written.
The Mr. Addict segment is the most moving in the book. “My father was an alcoholic,” she says, “and I had this real ‘if you love me you’ll change’ thing. But going out with addicts is nothing like William Burroughs, and I should know, I dated three addicts.’’
One man hid his heroin inside a teapot in a dresser under the house. When Nolan sold the dresser, he drove six hours to retrieve his stash. A few months later Nolan had an epiphany. “After a trillion failed relationships, I lost my appetite for the incurable,” she says. “I just woke up one day and realised that instead of trying to change the men I was with I should just change me! Eureka!”
These days there’s also the business of educating her girls so they don’t have to go through quite the same level of ‘research’ she did. “My daughter said to me the other day, ‘You know what Mum, I’m not going to marry until I find the right dress,’ and I thought, ‘Wow, what a great contemporary statement – nothing to do with the man at all’. Now that’s a girl whose got her priorities right.”
In the end, says Nolan, the book is not about her beating up on the men in her life. “It’s about my inability when I was younger to pick good men, and to write with compassion and kindness about it – and to have a laugh as well,” she explains.
The book itself is very like its author – attractive, irreverent, rude, downright funny, and curiously touching.
Candida Baker