Vivek Shraya wants to unravel our obsession with success with her own show about failure

Here & Queer is an interview series hosted by Peter Knegt that celebrates and amplifies the work of LGBTQ artists through unfiltered conversations.

Vivek Shraya has achieved a remarkable number of things in her career as a multi-hyphenate artist, but the one thing that just never quite came to fruition was becoming a pop star. Now, though, she has the distinction of being presumingly the only person in the world to have a series based on their own one-person show about ... about not becoming a pop star.

"I think one of the things that surprises me over and over again as I've worked on the many chapters of this story is I think it was always audacious for a brown queer kid from Edmonton to believe in this dream," Shraya says. "And at the same time, I'm so glad he did. I'm so glad he went for it."

Shraya explores this specific journey in the new CBC Gem series How To Fail as a Popstar, an adaptation of her stage show of the same name. We had the pleasure of having Shraya stop by the set of our own CBC Gem series, Here & Queer, to talk about what happens when a star isn't quite born (at least not in the way they wanted). You can watch the full episode here:

One of the things Shraya finds particularly hard about our culture — particularly when it comes to social media — is how obsessed we all are with "the optics of success and fame and popularity."

"The metrics are all about likability," she says. "And it's hard sometimes to not punish yourself when you look at those things and are like, 'What's wrong with me? How come I don't have those numbers? Or how come I'm not at that level?'"

Instead, she wanted to tell a story that isn't often told (at least not from an autobiographical perspective): a story of failure.

"It just felt important to want to find a space to tell that particular story, but also push against this idea that if you work hard and if you're talented and if you're nominally attractive or whatever, all these things are 'enough' to succeed," she says. "Because I think that there are a lot of people who do work hard, who are nominally talented, who might in some worlds be attractive — and who still don't succeed."

Shraya, of course, is by no means a failure. She's a Polaris Prize nominee, visual artist, filmmaker, author of bestsellers like She of the Mountains and I'm Afraid of Men. And now she's the creator and star of her own series.

"I think that one of the ways that I have dealt with trauma — and specifically homophobia from growing up — has been art," she says. "I think that in a world that has told me that I don't belong, that I shouldn't exist, the way that I have resisted and the way that I have shown up is by being creative and by actually making life through art."

Shraya says that one of the hardest things about being a queer brown artist in her 40s is the idea that there's a glass ceiling. 

"People talk about pushing it open, but I feel my experience is that they never let you in the house," she says. "You get your little toe in and then you have to be re-invited and you have to prove yourself again and again, I never feel like I get to stay.

"And so that that stuff feels really, really hard. But the art itself is actually so generative and so rewarding. And even just making this show... The last day, I ugly cried on set. And I literally said this was one of the happiest times of my life."

The entire first season of How To Fail as a Pop Star is streaming on CBC Gem as of October 13, 2023.