Perhaps just call it a memoir and leave it at that. And when it’s being told to the author’s kids – irrespective of whether or not she orders them to read it only after they turn 21 – it’s still too much information to hand to your kids about your own life. It’s also true that we put an unfair amount of burden on a woman as she tells her story, but trust me, this one merely reminded me of Wetlands by Charlotte Roche, and if you remember that book because of me, you’ll remember how grossed out I am with stuff like that. But the cringe overshadowed everything else so much, I began to question myself. Look, I still think Ali Wong is hilarious – there are many places where I laughed out loud because of how cheeky she was being. So many places had me cringing either because of how unnecessarily explicit or how tone deaf they were. why put it in a book like this? Why tell your daughters about the kind of things you got up to because you didn’t respect someone’s property and went ahead and peed on it? Why brag? Not to be gross by following up talking about ‘bad taste’ with ‘pee’, but why is there so much peeing in this book? Yes, talking about womanly bodily fluids is important, but come on, do they need to know that you peed on a main road in the middle of the night through a book? Tell them, if you like. Yet, she somehow comes off as callously tone deaf in so many of the things she talks about – something that left a bad taste as I progressed with the book. But THEN AGAIN…īut a couple of things I have to acknowledge:Īli Wong’s experiences as a female stand up comedian are enlightening to say the least, her calling out the sexism and misogyny of the world, and her thoughts/experiences of growing up Chinese-Vietnamese-American and visiting Vietnam later were intriguing enough to have kept me through the cringe. Then again, who am I to tell you want you can and cannot share with your kids? They’re your kids. They just don’t need to know all of that. On the other hand, if she wanted to share these things with her daughters, why make them public? Because honestly, I don’t see the point. Stomaching her words was a task that needed monumental effort and something that physically pains me to this day. Dear Girls is such a paradox because on one hand, Ali Wong says that it’s a letter to her daughters and while I can’t possibly tell anyone what to share with their daughters and what not to, the stuff she says in here are sometimes so explicit, so TMI that I cringed more than I laughed throughout the book.

Dear Girls by Ali Wong