Comedian Michelle Brasier on keeping her brother’s ashes in a sandwich bag

Exclusive: Michelle Brasier has a year most performers only dream of – a Silver Logie nomination, a BBC deal for Ghosts Australia, and her year-long run on stage in Pretty Woman: The Musical. Ask her what she’s proudest of, though, and she goes straight to her 2024 memoir.

My Brother’s Ashes Are in a Sandwich Bag, Brasier’s memoir about losing her father and older brother to cancer, was shortlisted for both the John Clarke Prize and the Russell Prize for Humour Writing in 2025.

“I love writing the book. I didn’t want to hand it back,” Brasier tells nine.com.au. “I kept pushing the deadline because I just wanted to spend so much time with my brother and my father, and my younger self.”

The name of the book has certainly turned heads but the book’s title, My Brother’s Ashes are in a Sandwich Bag, is representative of Brasier’s light, playful approach to life’s difficult moments.

After her brother, Paul, passed away from cancer, a portion of his ashes was given to her. As she describes it, they ended up stored in a Hercules-brand zip-lock sandwich bag – until a permanent place could be chosen.

Brasier uses this story in her work as a poignant mix of humour and grief, capturing how absurd and surreal handling loss can be.

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Brasier’s father died when she was 18, meaning she never really got to know him as an adult.

“I got to know him as a dad, a father, like an idea,” she says. “And a father is such a hefty idea.”

Her older brother had become similarly mythologised in her memory, someone she had to actively rediscover to do him justice on the page.

“I didn’t know that he’d ever felt sadness. I had to find out more about him in order to paint him as a three-dimensional person,” Brasier says. “He has two sons. I have two nephews, and they won’t remember him. So I felt a real responsibility to paint him properly and wholly, because he was such an extraordinary man.”

That responsibility shows up in the small, sharp details Brasier still wishes she could share with him. She recalls Monty Python’s Eric Idle telling her backstage after a gig that she had “great pipes” and was funny.

“The only person who would understand it in my family is my brother, and he’s not here,” she says. “He raised me on comedy. He knew all these people, he knew what the comedy festival was. It’s just this sad irony that he’s gone, and now he’s the one who would really be my first call, and he’s not around.”

Writing the book, Brasier says, became a way of putting that grief somewhere permanent.

“The book is really nice to have as a tribute to him,” she says. “He’s not buried anywhere, and I don’t feel like physically he’s anywhere. But he was such an inspiration. He travelled everywhere, on a dollar a day. He had the most amazing life, and he lived like he knew he was going to die young. That’s what I’ve tried to do as well.”

It’s also given Brasier a strange kind of closure. “I wrote the memoir and I put a full stop on that part of my life,” she says. “And now all my dreams are literally just coming true ... I wish I could get in touch with that younger version of myself now. She’s kind of externalised into the book.”

That younger self would probably be stunned by where Brasier is today. Ghosts Australia, in which she plays fan-favourite ghost Lindy, has just been picked up by the BBC for a UK premiere, following the British original.

“It’s so special,” Brasier says. “I’ve got such a lovely family in the UK that I really love, so I’m excited to finally be able to share it with them.”

She’s also just weeks from wrapping her stage debut in Pretty Woman: The Musical, playing Kit De Luca opposite Samantha Jade, a role that’s come with its own unexpected skill set.

“I’ve been doing Pretty Woman for almost a year, so I’m really good at running and jumping in heels,” she laughs.

As for what’s next, Brasier isn’t entirely sure and for someone used to hustling for opportunities, that’s a strange new problem to have.

“If all your dreams come true, then what? What are you supposed to do?” she says. “I’ve got this weird shift – people want to work with me in a different way now. I’m trying to navigate that and figure out exactly what my position is in the industry.”

For now, she’s writing her first musical and sitting on a new stand-up hour she’s yet to bring to Melbourne or Sydney. A second season of Ghosts Australia remains unconfirmed, but Brasier is hopeful.

“I’m really hopeful that we get a season two, so I can go back and do Lindy again,” she says.