“She’s really a lot like me,” comedian Rosebud Baker says of her almost-3-year-old daughter Minnow during our recent phone interview. “And it’s tough … I mean, it’s always been tough to live with myself, but now it’s like there’s two of me.”

Her mini-me is, for example, “really independent,” has strong opinions, and challenges whatever mom says. “She’s sticking her fingers under the door right now,” Baker says, laughing with exasperation and pride.

Baker, currently in the midst of a U.S. tour (and set to join the SheKnows “Love, Lust & Lit” special New York City event on Sept. 9) has that same type of stubborn tenacity, as evidenced in her juicy yet poignant memoir, Fully Baked, released earlier this summer. In it, readers learn that she lost a younger sister, 7, in a freak accident when she was a teen — prompting grief blunted by blackout drinking. That eventually led her into recovery and, thankfully, a steadily rising career as a comedian and comedy writer, including for Saturday Night Live and Amy Schumer (whom she calls “very down-to-earth”), before marrying (and splitting with) a fellow comedian and becoming a mom.

Writing the book was no easy feat, as she did so through miscarriage, IVF, pregnancy, and while freshly postpartum.

“There were so many different stages of the writing that were pretty heavy,” she says of having to return to her past. But that doesn’t mean it was overly difficult, she says, explaining, “I sort of skew that way.” That’s not to say she’s naturally negative, just not necessarily triggered by what she sees, simply, as transformations.

“The ‘darker’ the experience is to me, the richer it is in terms of my life,” she says. When she looks back, in fact, she doesn’t even qualify the positive experiences “as all that transformative,” except for the birth of her daughter. “Maybe that’s something that I should work on,” she adds with a laugh.

That outlook is certainly serving her comedy work, though. In last year’s Netflix comedy special The Mother Lode — cleverly filmed half pregnant and half postpartum, cutting back and forth between the two — Baker doesn’t shy away from using much of her heavy life moments as fodder, to great effect. She even makes light of the miscarriage she suffered before having Minnow.

“I wrote those jokes the week that it happened,” she says, though she soon put them away for over a year, realizing it had been too soon. After working through her loss in therapy, “They started working really well,” she says. “Sometimes the jokes are ready before you are, and sometimes you’re ready before the jokes are. So, you just kind of have to feel it out.”

It’s something the comedian does well in her memoir, often forgoing the jokes for some solemn philosophizing. She gets especially deep about loss and motherhood and recovery, and how they all connect. “If sobriety taught me that it’s not always pleasant to love yourself, motherhood is teaching me that it’s not always pleasant to love somebody else, especially if your experience of love is intertwined with loss,” she writes in her memoir. It was Baker’s way of describing her postpartum experience.

“The loss of my sister and the birth of my daughter really felt very intertwined, somatically,” Baker says. “Processing those two things at the same time was really very difficult, and I was overcome with love for her. But because of that, I was also overcome with incredible, paralyzing fear.”  

It was while working through all that, and while just starting to adjust to motherhood, that she returned to work as a writer at SNL. She says now that she went back too soon.

“Because it’s America, right? Everyone goes back to work too soon, because we have to,” she says. Still, she adds, “I don’t know if, even if you told me that I could have a year, that I would’ve taken it, because I was so attached to the identity that I built before having my daughter. And I felt that letting go of that work ethic would be letting go of that identity entirely. And I also just really loved it.”

Working in the famed writers’ room she says, was “like getting paid to go to Harvard. You’re just learning so much so quickly at a rapid pace. I wished that there was a drug I could have taken to absorb all of it better.”

The other writers became her “family,” supporting her through her postpartum days, she adds. “I really loved those people, and when my brain was like mush, it felt like they were there.” She says she will always be “grateful” that she got to work there.

Internalizing that, perhaps, could nudge Baker closer to one of her goals.

“I would love to get to a place, personally, where the positive experiences in my life are just as impactful as those that were difficult,” she says. “I think that would be a huge step in the right direction for me.”