BOOKS
Mom Com
It’s a hard-knock life, kids. Ali Wong
continues her truth-telling campaign in a new
memoir dedicated to her daughters.
Ali Wong prefers not to
focus on breaking barriers,
so let us not make too much of the
fact that one of our most successful
stand-up comedians is a woman
of Vietnamese-Chinese descent. Nor
will we linger on Wong’s having been
seven and a half months pregnant
when she recorded Baby Cobra, the
2016 Netflix special that vaulted her
to household-name status. (The
following Halloween saw an explosion
of women—and some men—sporting
striped spandex dresses over baby
bumps.) Let’s commend her for her
real triumph: She has repurposed the
reliably tepid genre of mom-com
(think: jokes about #winetime or
toddler iPad privileges) into material
that electrifies with its audacity.
In her first book, Dear Girls: Intimate
Tales, Untold Secrets & Advice for
Living Your Best Life (Random House),
Wong digs her practical flats deeper
into this treacherous terrain and spins
a volume whose pages simultaneously
shock and satisfy. In 14 essays framed
as letters for her very young daughters
to read at a much later date, Wong riffs
on her cesarean section and intolerance
for plot-free board books, and also
opens up about the regular counseling
sessions she and her husband attend
(“cheaper than a divorce”) and her
strained relationship with her mother
(whose passive nature made her
more “koala mom” than “tiger mom”).
Wong, who once joked that
“feminism is the worst thing that ever
happened to women” (no more
lounging around streaming Netflix at
noon), has always been a stealthy force
for women’s empowerment. And that
oblique approach continues here:
Dear Girls is not so much a real-talk
handbook as it is a myth-puncturing
manifesto. A supportive husband, she
writes, is not just someone who cheers
you on; he’s someone willing to take on
the tedium of household management
that usually falls to women. The book
ends by handing over the afterword
to her husband so that
he can have his say.
With a solemnity that
teeters on humorous,
he reflects on the
importance of his
meditation practice and ayahuasca
ceremonies, and tells the girls that their
mother resembles a “mystical
priestess.” So what if a man gets the last
word? He has no chance of stealing the
show.—lau r en mechling
ELSEWHERE IN THE literary
firmament, essayist Leslie
Jamison—sometimes called
a modern Didion or Sontag—
offers up a more varied
examination of what it
means to be a contemporary
woman in a new collection,
Make It Scream, Make It
Burn (Little, Brown), while
Cyrus Grace Dunham
examines the experience of
transitioning in the raw
and powerful A Year Without
a Name (Little, Brown).
A duo of legendary female
rockers takes readers
backstage (and on the bus)
in new memoirs: ’90s
indie icon Liz Phair tells her
Horror Stories (Random
House), and Blondie’s Debbie
Harry has her readers Face It
(Dey Street Books).—L.M.
FUNNY GIRL
WONG, ABOVE,
BRINGS HER
SIGNATURE
SENSE OF
HUMOR TO HER
FIRST BOOK.
VLIFE
122 OCTOBER 2019 VOGUE.COM
TOP: STEPHANIE GONOT.
NEW YORKER,
2016. BOOKS: TIM HOUT.
