Title: Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets, and Advice for Living Your Best Life
Author: Ali Wong
Genre: Memoir, autobiography, comedy
Publisher: Random House Audio
Publication Date: 2019
Format: Audiobook
Length: 6 hours 20 minutes

Read if you like: memoirs, Ali Wong’s comedy, satire, stories of motherhood, balancing career and parenthood, comedy

Rating: 

Last week, I had a long drive scheduled to visit family and no audiobooks downloaded to my phone. Since I knew I was going to have 5 uninterrupted hours of driving, on top of driving around the city for appointments and errands, I checked out what was immediately available online at my library and found Ali Wong’s memoir Dear Girls. I quickly checked it out without even reading the description and wow, what a good decision that turned out to be. 

Wong’s memoir was a mix of her signature comedy style (raunchy, outrageous, and relatable) and insightful reflections on her experiences in love, life, career, and growing up. At times I was laughing at the ridiculousness of some of her stories and experiences, but an equal amount of the time, I was also thoroughly enamoured with her experiences as a woman and mother in entertainment. Her advice was simultaneously quirky and meaningful, and it was delivered in such an entertaining way that I found the hours flying by. 

If you’ve loved Wong’s comedy and are interested in her broader experiences as an Asian American, as a woman, and as a mother, this memoir is a fantastic look into her experiences and the learning she’s gained throughout her life and career. I thought this was a superb audiobook and memoir, one I’d recommend, so long as you can enjoy some of the more outrageous aspects of Wong’s comedy.

The Book: Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets, and Advice for Living Your Best Life by Ali Wong

Dear Girls is a memoir written by Ali Wong as told through letters to her daughters that discuss reflections on love, life, culture, career, and more. Wong covers what it was like to be a woman in comedy trying to make it in New York, San Fransisco, and Los Angeles, what it was like to grow up Asian American and her discovery of different cultures in her travels, what it was like to be brutally single in different cities, and a whole host of other stories from growing up as a loud, outgoing, wild child. She also covers what the early days of parenting were like, and how she manages to balance career and family. 

The audiobook is read by Wong and delivers so much of her humour, alongside genuine and heartfelt observations and reflections from her life. While the book is addressed to her daughters, there’s much to learn and understand regardless of who is listening. 

The Review

This book was a ride, and I loved it. It would swing from being outrageously funny, to painfully relatable. I loved that Wong approached her stories authentically and didn’t try to water herself down or make herself more palatable. It was supremely unpretentious while still being insightful, and while Wong’s experiences are sometimes unique, a lot of the feelings and emotions that she discusses are highly relatable. 

While much of Wong’s discussions around the entertainment industry and her experiences as a struggling comic were entertaining, it was her reflections as a mother that I felt hit the hardest. While Wong is in an exceptionally public career, the struggles that she has in trying to balance motherhood and her job are relatively universal and feel particularly poignant if you’re a career-minded, ambitious person. A lot of the time, no matter how hard you’re trying, it feels like you’re failing. Our society in North America does a fairly poor job of supporting new parents, and the more demanding that your career is, the harder that is to balance. Wong acknowledges that even in the privileged positon she’s in, she still struggles, so what the plight is like for those without that privilege is even more severe. 

I felt like this memoir was supremely entertaining, and as you’d expect from a comic, very funny. Wong manages to cover a broad swath of advice and experiences through a hysterical lens that had me louding out loud to myself in my car. If you’re a fan of Wong’s comedy and looking for something extremely entertaining to listen to, I’d definitely recommend this book. It was a fun ride and I’m glad I picked it up.