The Last Black Unicorn by Tiffany Haddish

🌟 I read this for the Yule Bingo Challenge, for the category of Tonks: strong heroine. For more info on this challenge, click here. 🌟

I knew I wanted to read this book the moment I watched her interview with Trevor Noah. She seemed like such a fun, wonderful, crazy person. I watched Girls Trip recently, you know, for "research," and in that movie, I feel like Tiffany Haddish is channeling a lot of her own self for that character.

THE LAST BLACK UNICORN is a celebrity memoir that actually lives up to the hype. It's one of those raw, honest memoirs that have become so rare these days, because I think the quick access to the internet makes it all easy for people - readers - to spread the dirt, and the outrage, and be all, "Oh my God, you'll never guess what Tiffany said in her memoir! #boycott"

These days, it's like we require celebrities to be saints in order to win our admiration. They have to be larger than life and elegant, but also play by all the rules we set for them. If they don't, they get torn apart in gossip magazines or called things like "tacky," "skanky," or "ungrateful." It really isn't fair to expect people to live like this, since most people don't live like this, and I'm glad that's changing at last. It certainly results in much more candid memoirs... like this one!

In Tiffany's memoir, she portrays her authentic self and talks in the book the way she talks in real life. While reading the book, I could actually imagine her voice in my head. It added an extra level of enjoyment for me, because it made the book so personal. Most of the book is laugh out loud funny, either because she's laying out the scenes the way she does in her comedy routines, or because she's been through so many ridiculous situations that you can't help but let out a horrified giggle as you clutch your metaphorical pearls. My favorite example of this is when Tiffany decides to get back at a cheating ex (whose sex tape she scavenged out of a dumpster) by pooping in his shoes and then splicing a scene from the tape into bootlegged copies of Charlie's Angels and sending them all to his family for Christmas. Which they watched. And called her about. Angrily. She was not sorry. She also became a pimp just to undercut his own amateur attempts at pimping - and succeeded!

But the book has a darker side too, with abuse in many different kinds of forms, ranging from neglect from her mom and foster mom, to abusive boyfriends and husbands, to molestation (from her foster grandparent), to the sexism that occurs from being a woman in comedy, and how people try to take advantage of women who are just starting out the same way they try to take advantage of starlets.

THE LAST BLACK UNICORN is a really funny memoir, and if you don't mind darker scenarios being written about irreverently, and with a lot of cursing to boot, I think you'll probably enjoy this book, if not for the honesty, then for the way she has managed to channel a seemingly limitless amount of positivity for the negatives in her life and used humor as a way of coping.

Thank you, Trevor Noah, for mentioning this book on your channel and bumping it up my to-read list.

4 to 4.5 out of 5 stars