Comedian Youngmi Mayer opens her memoir, I'm Laughing Because I'm Crying--equal parts rollicking and heartbreaking--with a confessional epigraph: "To Mom and Dad (Don't be mad at me)." She quickly warns, "I am comfortable saying shit that I truly should not be saying in any situation." Woven through her unfiltered memories of growing up biracial--her mother is Korean, her father white--in a dysfunctional family are crucial, smack-in-the-face observations about selfhood, inherited Korean and Irish generational trauma, gender disparity, and, most poignantly, the mother/child bond.
Born in Songtan, South Korea, near a U.S. military base, Mayer's challenging childhood continued in Jeju, Saipan, and Seoul before she moved to San Francisco, Calif., at age 20 to escape an abusive boyfriend. After obtaining a refund for the unused return portion of her airline ticket, she had $700 to start her new life. Her young adulthood was defined by drugs, violence, and brief stint as a sex worker. She met and married chef Danny Bowien, with whom she shared skyrocketing fame and fortune, and also a son. She chose to be a "poor... happy" single mom and eventually found her voice as a stand-up comedian.
Laughing while crying was, and is, Mayer's coping mechanism. "Do you know what happens if you laugh while crying?" her mother insisted. "Hair grows out of your butthole." Mayer laughed herself to survival: "I come from the strongest people, who have been through the worst of humanity, and the jokes were what made it possible for us to continue. I would not be here without inappropriate humor." For her lucky readers, chortles and tears prove inevitable. --Terry Hong