Review of This American Woman: A One-in-a-Billion Memoir by Zarna Garg

Comedian Zarna Garg lived several lives before falling into comedy in midlife and realizing it was where she'd belonged all along. Her memoir is candid, poignant, funny, and always entertaining. I loved this peek into her fascinating life.

Zarna Garg fled her comfortable lifestyle and her widower father to avoid an unwanted arranged marriage at age 14. She begged places to stay from friends and acquaintances in Mumbai, homeless. Desperate for food and shelter and tired of overstaying her welcome and never having security, she was returning home and on the verge of agreeing to be married off, until her long-hoped-for visa to the US came through. Instead of becoming a child bride, she ran from home and began a dramatically different new life in Akron, Ohio. In midlife, she reimagined her future again and became a hard-working comedian who opened for Tina Fey and Amy Poehler and then warranted her own headliner spots.

But along the way Zarna was not only a homeless runaway, but an Indian matchmaker, a law student, a stay-at-home mom, and a prizewinning screenwriter. On a dare from her daughter, she hopped onto an open mic stage, spouted off comedic takes on her life, and after lots of scrapping and scrambling, the rest was history.

Garg offers an honest, funny account of overcoming sobering challenges and determining her own destiny after years of struggles and constant worries about being a burden on those who might help her. Her intense push to achieve is accompanied by doubt, periods of low self-esteem, and feelings of unworthiness that stem from her childhood.

At the very beginning the pacing felt a little uneven to me, but then Garg hit her stride, and I was taken with her frank narrative, her relentless optimism and drive, her self-deprecating accounts of her imperfections, and her poignant reflections.

I love an honest memoir that lets a reader into the author's inner world, and Zarna has lived a fascinating life that I wanted to learn more about. I laughed out loud repeatedly while I was reading this charming memoir by this strong, funny woman.

I received a prepublication edition of this title, to be published April 29, courtesy of Ballantine Books and NetGalley. 

More memoir love

For more memoirs you might like, please check out these Bossy reviews as well as Greedy Reading Lists of my favorites.