Years later, after she was introduced to the masses through her Netflix stand-up specials 'Baby Cobra' and 'Hard Knock Wife,' she got the chance to perform in front of the person who inspired her to get into comedy in the first place. At the part-coffee shop, part-laundromat, 'I would go up every single night at a different mic and try a million new jokes,' Wong writes. She shares in her book that one of the first places she performed was at the Brainwash Cafe on Folsom Street in San Francisco. In the memoir, Wong shares the successes and setbacks that have shaped her journey from stand-up comedian to TV actor to writer, producer and star of her own Netflix hit movie 'Always Be My Maybe.'īut before she was making out with the likes of Keanu Reeves, Daniel Dae Kim and Randall Park (in the film, that is), she was weathering the ups and downs of open mic nights in San Francisco. Her new book, ' Dear Girls,' is a humorous and intimate letter to her two young daughters about growing up, getting married, starting a family and growing her career. But the comedian says learning to like bombing, and doing it a lot, is one of the most important things in order to be successful in the business.

“It was so deeply satisfying.But for on-stage performers like Ali Wong, failure can be a lot more public - and devastating. “The white piece of paper looked like a hairbrush afterward,” Wong writes. There is the scene where she pees on her husband, Justin, while he is trimming her pubic hair the ayahuasca hallucination where she gives herself oral sex the recurring shtick of splashing water on her nether-regions before a romp and even the relatively clean, yet still blech-inducing, Biore pore strip she yanks off the nose of her blackhead-infested mother. But in her first book, she paints even more indelicate pictures, in every shade of blue. 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 starmaking Netflix specials, “ Baby Cobra” (2016) and “ Hard Knock Wife” (2018) (she is donating one to the Smithsonian, and both have become popular feminist Halloween costumes) and the extra-stark realities she shares onstage about life after giving birth, from “bull’s-eye” nipples to exploding milk to, well, actual afterbirth. 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-color visuals of dear ol’ mom - and, uh, best of luck trying to unsee them.

Dear Girls by Ali Wong