Sharing and some oversharing
Wong’s book is cringey in the best way, just like the comedian’s standup routines
Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets & Advice for Living Your Best Life Ali Wong Random House If Ali Wong’s preschool-age daughters ever actually read the comedic memoir meant for them, Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets & Advice for Living Your Best Life, they will collect some mighty off-colour visuals of dear ol’ mom.
Wong’s swaggery comedy is already a trove of now-iconic imagery, like the not-so-maternity mini dresses she wore while hugely pregnant in her star-making Netflix specials, Baby Cobra (2016) and 2018’s Hard Knock Wife (she is donating one to the Smithsonian, and both have become popular feminist Halloween costumes). And the extrastark realities she shares onstage about life after giving birth, from “bull’s-eye” nipples to exploding milk to, well, actual afterbirth. But in her first book, she paints even more indelicate pictures: the scene where she pees on her husband, Justin, while he is trimming her pubic hair; the ayahuasca-induced hallucination in which she gives herself oral sex; and even the relatively clean, yet still blech-inducing, Bioré pore strip she yanks off the nose of her blackhead-infested mother.
Post-baby Cobra, Wong seemingly exploded into A-list status — you know, the old “overnight” success story of someone who pounded the pavement outside freeway-adjacent motels for years. So for come-lately fans wondering, “Where did this tiny filthy phenom come from?” Dear Girls fills in the gaps. Wong’s study-abroad program to her mom’s native Vietnam, for example, proved culturally and ideologically formative, leaving her with a taste both for exploring the outer limits of her comfort zone — so crucial to her brand of comedy — and for eating fertilized duck embryos.
Wong’s skyrocketing success of late — from selling out mega venues on her Milk & Money tour, to starring in, co-writing and producing the hit Netflix rom-com Always Be My Maybe — gets lassoed down to earth with humbling, early-years anecdotes about fearing for her life on seedy tours, trying out material in clubs that doubled as laundromats and bombing in front of Eddie Murphy.
Dear Girls can be crude and flippant, Lol-dense and breezy — so breezy, in fact, you will be desensitized to the grossest of Wong’s gross-outs by the end of the first chapter, at which point you have already learned how to hold in a fart during yoga. But as with her stage comedy, she is also sneakily thoughtful about the public roles she occupies — Asian American, working mom, woman on comedy stages — and the come-from-behind grind they necessarily demand.
“Convincing an audience that a person who looks like me could be funny,” she writes, “and proving to them that I belonged onstage, was a steep uphill battle.” She even offers surprisingly tender takes on her immigrant-minded parents, her sensitive husband and motherhood, the match that lit her career on fire.
Wong’s daughters should consider themselves lucky to have a self-made, cultural touchstone for a mother, let alone one doling out personalized advice about dating rappers, the importance of travel and surefire signifiers of a worthy Chinese restaurant: “The pork and shrimp will arrive right away, but it takes an hour to get a glass of water.”