A brutal take-down on the TV talent show led Emily Wilson into therapy. A decade later, she has turned her grim experience into award-winning standup
It’s not that Emily Wilson used to be secretive about the fact that, as a teenager, she’d appeared on the American incarnation of the X Factor. Rather, it hadn’t exactly gone well for her – awfully, actually – and by the time she was a 20-something comedian carving out a career in New York City, it was a period of her past she was desperate to forget.
To say she’d totally buried the memories, Wilson reckons, might be overly dramatic. “It’s more that I knew it was shitty, and that it impacted me,” the 26-year-old explains over Zoom from her Upper West Side apartment. At 15, she’d appeared on the TV talent show, was treated brutally, had her dreams crushed yet was dragged further into the competition’s gruelling rounds. It’s fair to say a path to pop stardom wasn’t forthcoming. “It was total humiliation,” she says, “so I tried to put it in a box and never go back to it.” If the topic came up in conversation, Wilson would shut it down – “Yeah, it was crazy;” “I know, right?” – giving stock answers to end it. “It was to the point that only eight months into therapy did I first mention it,” says Wilson. Unsurprisingly, her therapist believed it warranted a chat.
