I could write a whole dissertation about how much I love Ali Wong. She wrote and starred in my favorite romantic comedy of the last five years, “Always Be My Maybe,” and has some truly hilarious stand-up specials, such as “Hard Knock Wife” (2018), where she isn’t afraid to get up on stage and talk about her after birth discharge in front of thousands of people. While none of this may be news to you, there’s more than just entertainment value in what Wong talks and writes about in her new book Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets and Advice for Living Your Best Life.
Dear Girls is hysterically funny and informative on signs of a good Asian restaurant, but also includes some personal experiences about pregnancy and motherhood that are too often ignored or taken for granted. Reading this book pushed me to ask, why don’t we talk about how C-sections are scary? Or that miscarriages are common? Doesn’t glossing over all the imperfections of pregnancy just leave women more vulnerable to feel like freaks when these things happen to them? As Wong points out in her book, one in four women miscarry, yet when women experience this they are often made to feel that they or their bodies are at fault. Wong describes looking to powerful women like Michelle Obama during this time in her life, and by sharing her story in Dear Girls, Ali Wong will likely become a source of inspiration herself for women needing to remind themselves that plenty of incredible women have faced challenging pregnancies and come out stronger on the other side.
I may have no current plans to become pregnant in the next decade, but Wong’s writing, much like her comedy, is impactful whether one can relate to her story or not. Her openness and honesty about her experiences is not only refreshing but also an important reminder that these topics only become normalized when we talk about them. Tales of her pregnancies and motherhood are intertwined with the narrative of her work as a stand-up comedian and writer, which she found success in without having to sacrifice her family or career aspirations. The narrative that women can’t juggle both a demanding job and a family has been repeated to me more times than I can count, and the fact that Ali Wong’s embraces her status as a mother and uses it to inform her comedy is just another way she challenges the status quo. Dear Girls already had everything I could ask for from a raunchy, intimate comedy memoir but its willingness to speak on all the taboo subjects we have been conditioned not to talk about is just one more reason to run out and pick up a copy.