Emily V. Gordon

Emily Vance Gordon was born on May 3, 1979 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA. She earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and later MS/EdS in couples and family counseling from there. After completing her education, Emily V. Gordon began her career as a couples and family therapist in North Carolina in 2004. For her practice, she moved to Chicago, Illinois in 2005, and again to Brooklyn, New York in 2007. After becoming a writer, she relocated to Los Angeles in 2010.

Following her marriage to Kumail Nanjiani, Emily V. Gordon, found it increasingly difficult to spend time together with her husband as with his rising popularity, his schedules also became more hectic, and they could hardly meet outside of his work environment. Already dissatisfied with her job as a therapist, she eventually determined to switch career and look for different ways to sustain herself. By 2009, she started booking standup comedy shows for live audiences and television, which gradually led to writing jobs.

In 2010, she created the comedy show ‘The Meltdown with Jonah and Kumail’ with Jonah Ray and her husband Kumail as co-hosts. The next year, she was approached by comedian and actor Chris Hardwick to turn the location in the back of Meltdown Comics into a curated comedy venue, Nerdist Showroom, where she served as the program director till 2012. The show was later broadcast as a TV program on Comedy Central in 2014. She did freelance writing jobs for various publications for a while, and started working on a semi-autobiographical story with Kumail, covering their unique love story. After it was made into the hugely successful film ‘The Big Sick’ in 2017, she attained the status of a celebrity.

Emily V. Gordon met her future husband Kumail Nanjiani at a stand-up set at Chicago’s Lincoln Lodge, where she had heckled him during his show. He approached her after the show and playfully accused her of interrupting his act. In the ensuing conversation, they got to know each other, following which he showed her what her name looks like in Urdu writing, a signature pickup move he often employed.

The two soon started dating, but the relationship came to a sudden halt eight months later after she became sick with a mysterious inflammatory disease. She had to be put into medically induced coma to prevent further spreading of the disease. After eight days of performing various tests on her, doctors discovered that she had adult-onset Still's disease (AOSD), an extremely rare form of arthritis which, if left untreated, can shut down vital organs. In the meantime, Kumail mustered the courage to tell his parents about his relationship, which was kept secret from them as he was certain that his conservative parents would not consent to the union. However, it is most probably because she was in a coma that they were more supportive than they would have been. However, as soon as she was well enough, his parents insisted that they get married. They subsequently got married in a secret courthouse wedding in Chicago on July 14, 2007. Two weeks later, they had a three-day-long traditional Muslim-Pakistani wedding arranged by Kumail's family. However, the marriage was still kept secret from many of their friends and acquaintances in order to avoid detailing all the circumstances that led to the sudden decision. A few years later, they held a reception at a bar in New York to announce the news of their marriage.