Welcome to Comfort Read!
Your new favorite sorta blog.
Hello!
I’m Alison Leiby and welcome to my Substack, Comfort Read! We here at Comfort Read Inc. (which is composed of me, my large cat named Rizz, and several house plants) are thrilled to have you. Help yourself to one of the many small bowls of snacks I have put out. I recommend the parmesan crisps.
What is Comfort Read? Great question! I’ve been noodling around on starting a Substack newsletter for a while and was struggling to land on what it would be about. I kept thinking of different topics I care about, different writing perspectives I have, different areas of expertise I excel in, and I realized I just want a time machine. I want to go back in time to when the internet was about websites. I want a blog.
Comfort Read is the online version of a comfort watch or comfort food. It’s a break, it’s familiar, it’s nostalgia, it’s what you want to settle in and read something that’s just fun. It’s rewatching Seinfeld. It’s eating good mashed potatoes. I can’t say it won’t involve current events, but it certainly won’t be an accounting of global gloom in any way.
So that’s what this is going to be. I know by nature regularly writing without oversight is what a lot of people are doing here, but I want to embrace the spirit of 2009 blogging. I want to go deep into why Real Housewives feels so stale in the last few years and why those women need to be getting in fights at Jill Stuart fashion shows. I want to reflect on some of the best meals I have ever had and the context around those to interrogate what makes the act of dining sometimes feel so special (and how many ways you can include Old Bay seasoning in cooking). I want to go long on jeans—in word count, not inseam, I’m an old millennial and I will die in a high rise, straight leg, ankle skimming cut, thank you.
This is the place to come read for a bit about the inner workings of a 40-something woman in Brooklyn who spends too much on gourmet snacks and cashmere and deeply wants to defund the police and eradicate car culture from the city. This is a comfort zone, and I want this to be a real comfort read for everyone who visits. I’m not afraid of writing a thoughtful long form essay or a silly list of different songs I made up and sing to my cat. Both have a home here!
If you don’t know me already, I’m a New York based stand-up comedian, writer, and podcaster. You may know me from my off-Broadway run of Oh God, A Show About Abortion. You may also know me from the many television shows I have written for like The President Show, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, or others, most of which were quickly canceled or never picked up. You may know me from my podcast Ruined which I do with the brilliant Halle Kiefer, who every week tells me the gory details of another horror movie I refuse to see but just simply must know the ending of. I hope that in spring 2026 you’ll know me from my debut book of essays, which I can’t even link to yet. This newsletter is a procrastination tool as much as it is self promotion. See, women really can have it all!
So, welcome! I’ll end each entry with some fun bullet points to highlight some things I liked from the week, some shows I’m looking forward to doing that maybe you should come to, and any other housekeeping/fun/promotion/pictures of my otherworldly perfect cat. Thanks for coming!
-Alison (and Rizz)
Excited !!
Yay! So excited for this ❤️❤️