Actress and Comedian Alyssa Limperis on Her Late Father and Her New Special, “No Bad Days”

When the comedian and actress Alyssa Limperis was 25 years old in 2015, her dad was diagnosed with a stage four glioblastoma tumor in his brain. It’s an aggressive form of cancer that is almost always lethal and her father, Jim, a vivacious sheet metal salesman who was athletic, strong, and almost supernaturally optimistic, would be dead in a year. When he died, she immediately got to work to help herself process the grief, writing a one-woman stage show called No Bad Days—now its own hour-long comedy special streaming on Peacock—about watching him slip away and how deeply his death changed the course of her life and who she would become. Listen as Tell Me About Your Father co-host Elizabeth talks to Alyssa about No Bad Days, the uniquely terrifying destabilization that comes with losing a parent in your twenties (a time when you’re technically an adult, but come on), waiting for the “movie goodbye” from him that never came, and how she tries to carry on her dad’s love of life in everything she does.