Audiobook Review- Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets, and Advice for Living Your Best Life

Title: Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets, and Advice for Living Your Best Life

Author: Ali Wong

Pub. Date: October 15th 2019

Genre: Auto Biography/Memoir/Humor

Publisher: Random House

Run Time: 6 Hours

Format: Audiobook

Where to start? I LOVE Ali Wong!!! 🖤 I watched Always Be My Maybe on Netflix earlier this year & it’s the one movie that actually helped me get through some down days. I just knew I had to listen to her new book Dear Girls & get to know the comedian a bit better, no regrets here! last night I stayed up till 2am watching her stand-up on Netflix “Baby Cobra” & had tears in my eyes from all the laughter. I love auto-biographies/Memoirs, especially those by comedians & have always preferred the audio-book format. Dear Girls is a collection of stories that reads like a long letter to Ali’s daughters. She recounts life as a single woman in NYC and what the dating scene looked like for her leading up to when she meets her husband & father to her girls. There are moments where she drops some knowledge on the comedy scene & what it’s like for a female trying to catch her big break. I LOVED how she makes it known from the get that comedy is something you have to have a passion for. She has a deep appreciation for the small gigs in shady areas that eventually led her to her big break. One things Ali shares is that she knows & has Asian comedian friends who stuck to performing within their Asian communities. This is something Ali wasn’t trying to do, she branched out & really put herself out there. Once she reached a certain level of success & started going on tour, she brought two of her Asian comedian friends along to open her shows.

The love for her roots & cultural background is a big theme in Dear Girls. She talks about how even though it sometimes brings forth judgment from her friend group, dating someone from your own cultural background has its perks. When she met her husband, she knew she had met the one because of how much they have in common. A shared love of Asian cuisine, parents who taught them the value of a dollar, and last but not least a DEEP appreciation for all things 90’s hip hop and R&B. These are some of the things we see her use as inspiration for the movie Always Be My Maybe in which she co-starred & wrote for. I LOVED hearing about her birthing story simply because she doesn’t hold back. Ali gives us the beautiful along with the ugly deets many don’t talk about when describing the birth of their kids. Let’s face it, it can get nasty in the delivery room & I appreciated hearing someone recount their delivery day while I nodded along in agreement haha! There are most definitely some cringe worthy moments where Ali goes into detail about her sex life & I just about died laughing each time! One day her daughters will look back & appreciate those nuggets of wisdom she dropped on them.

Listening to this audio-book got me thinking about writing my own letters to my two tiny humans. A no holds barred approach to journaling that would leave them with a sense of hope when they’re going through ups & downs in love and life. In the last chapter to this audiobook, Ali brought in her husband. In this chapter he talks about meeting Ali and tells his girls a bit about gender roles & the effects on men who don’t necessarily follow traditional roles. Ali’s husband is super supportive of her career & an amazing dad who flew back and forth with the girls to make sure they were together as a family. Traditionally, the men are expected to be the bread winners as was the case with their own fathers. Ali & her husband adjusted their family unit to what worked best for them. Although he is a Harvard graduate & a successful entrepreneur, my heart smiled when I heard how there came time where he sold Ali merch outside of her shows. I loved hearing Ali gush about how she knew her husband was a catch the minute she saw him. Listening to her hubby speak about Ali with admiration was heart warming & you get a sense that they really are soulmates. I walked away from this audiobook knowing that seeing Ali at one of her shows is now a MUST! 🖤