In Chelsea Handler's office, time is currency. It's not just Los Angeles: Handler, the second female late-night talk-show host in American history - Joan Rivers was the first, in 1983 - is charged up. Fifteen dates have to be added to her 21-city stand-up tour for Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang, her third anthology of comic essays and second New York Times best-seller, after the original dates sold out.
The book made its debut at No1 in late March; her previous two, My Horizontal Life and Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea, occupied third and second place on the corresponding paperback list the same week. Her show, the E! network's Chelsea Lately, which gets close to a million viewers per night, has just celebrated its 500th episode. 'You know, it goes by pretty quickly,' she says.
Handler, 35, denies exhaustion, but her face tells a different story. 'That's kind of how I operate,' she shrugs. 'I like to go at full speed. Kind of. I mean, either I'm doing that thing where I lie in bed watching Lifetime movies all day, or I'm super super busy.'
Her trademark? The sexualised insincerity of female low-end service providers. She is the diner waitress at once dazzled by celebrity and scornful of her ability to be dazzled, the indifferently seductive air hostess who accidentally - or perhaps not - upends a tray into your lap. Handler, a long-time David Sedaris fan, wrote Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang in 'six or nine' months between full-time television commitments, which made it seem 'more time-consuming' than her first two anthologies.
The book showcases Handler at her emotionally disorganised finest: high on psilocybin mushrooms and dancing in a restaurant with her brother (her sister walks over and delicately notes that there is 'no music playing, and you and Greg are related'); paying for Sylvan, her 'big, black, British' single father-of-two driver, to join her for a vacation with Ted Harbert, then her 54-year-old de facto partner of three years and still chief executive of E!'s parent company, the Comcast Entertainment Group; and luxuriating in 'completely unnecessary and, above all, ludicrous' lies.
'It's truly fascinating,' a girlfriend notes. 'I think there's a pretty strong chance you could be a full-blown sociopath.'