Foolish
Tales of Assimilation, Determination, and Humiliation
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
In this hilariously revealing debut memoir, comedian Sarah Cooper charts her rise from lip-synching in church to lip-synching the president, and all the dad issues she collected along the way.
As the youngest of four in a tight-knit Jamaican family, Cooper cut her teeth in the mean cornfields of suburban Maryland. Soon she became a charmingly neurotic woman trying to break her worst patterns and reclaim her linen closet. From an early obsession with hair bands to her struggle to escape the immigrant-to-basic-bitch pipeline to her use of the Internet as a marriage counselor (after being fired by two real ones) and the curse of her TED Talk vibe, Cooper invites us to share in her triumphs and humiliations as she tries (and fails) to balance her own dreams with the American dream.
With determination and wit, Cooper mines a lifetime of oppressive perfectionism for your laughter and enjoyment, as she moves from tech to comedy, marriage to divorce, smart to foolish, while proving once and for all that being foolish is actually the smartest thing you can do.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This witty memoir-in-essays from comedian Cooper (How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men's Feelings) traces her trajectory from bookish child of Jamaican immigrants to social media superstar. Cooper, who rose to fame in 2020 by lip-syncing to then-president Donald Trump's statements about Covid-19 ("I see the disinfectant knocks it out in a minute"), begins by recounting her youth in Rockville, Md., as the youngest of four children. She shares hilarious passages from the diary she kept as a 13-year-old (in which crushes and the 1990 Gulf War hold equal weight) and chronicles her devastation at being cut from the elementary school chorus (only to discover years later that her music teacher was arrested on child pornography charges). From there, she catalogs her difficulties juggling a passion for comedy with a career in tech, her unsuccessful stabs at romance ("An alternate title for this memoir was ‘Rejected by All the Right Men' "), and eventually, her quest to convert her viral social media videos into a bona fide entertainment career. Throughout, Cooper is unfailingly funny and consistently relatable. This is sure to please Cooper's fans and likely to net her new ones.
