A review by hawkeye1846
Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets, & Advice for Living Your Best Life by Ali Wong

5.0

This is the best memoir I've ever read, and I cannot recommend it enough. Ali Wong doesn't have perfect prose or fanciful metaphors, but I don't care. Nobody (except me) will ever consider this to be a great work of literature, but I don't care. It's entertaining, funny, revelatory, and has a lot to say about more than just the author herself. Wong shows herself, not her accomplishments and her fame, to the reader through a series of enchanting episodes from her life. She's a gifted storyteller and has a sense of the bottom line of a story, the punchline if you will. She also gives insight and advice that indicate an intelligence and savvy much greater than her facade would leave you to believe. She manages to make the most vulgar of jokes in one breath while in the next speaking from the inner recesses of her mind on the things that matter most to her. Her ability to accomplish both in equal measure make this work outshine any of the political or celebrity memoirs that detail "here's why I'm great and here's all the great stuff I did." Wong reveals to the reader who she is as a person, warts and all, and does so fearlessly. The memoir is even better in audiobook form, because her comedic voice adds that extra punch to take this book over the top.