I'm Laughing Because I'm Crying
A Memoir
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4.9 • 14 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Elle's Best Nonfiction Books of 2024 | The Boston Globe's Best Books of 2024 | San Francisco Chronicle's Best New Books of Fall 2024
From standup comedian Youngmi Mayer, an unforgettable memoir written with “raw, enviable freedom that simply floors you,” interrogating whiteness, gender, and sexuality in America, navigating a tumultuous childhood in Korea and Saipan, and coming to terms with her parents’ shortcomings (Michelle Zauner).
“Do you know what happens if you laugh while crying? Hair grows out of your butthole.” It was a constant truism Youngmi Mayer’s mother would say threateningly after she would make her daughter laugh while crying. Her mother used it to cheer her up in moments when she could tell Youngmi was overtaken with grief. The humorous saying would never fail to lighten the mood, causing both daughter and mother to laugh and cry at the same time. Her mother had learned this trick from her mother, and her mother had learned this from her mother before her: it had also helped an endless string of her family laugh through suffering.
In I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying, Youngmi jokes through the retelling of her childhood as an offbeat biracial kid in Saipan, a place next to a place that Americans might know. She jokes through her difficult adolescence where she must parent her own parents: a mother who married her husband because he looked like white Jesus (and the singer of The Bee Gees). And with humor and irreverence and full-throated openness, she jokes even while sharing the story of what her family went through during the last century of colonialism and war in Korea, while reflecting how years later, their wounds affect her in New York City as a single mom, all the while interrogating whiteness, gender, and sexuality.
Youngmi jokes through these stories in hopes of passing onto the reader what her family passed down to her: The gift of laughing while crying. The gift of a hairy butthole. Because throughout it all, the one thing she learned was one cannot exist without the other. And like a yin and yang, this duality is reflected in this whip-smart, heart-wrenching, and disarmingly funny memoir told by a bright new voice with so much heart and wisdom.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Comedian Mayer blends wit and wisdom in this charming account of growing up biracial in Korea and Saipan, raising a child alone in New York City, and coming to terms with the damages of generational trauma. She begins with an account of her maternal Korean family, from her great-grandmother's late-19th-century kidnapping by a bachelor (in a Joseon-era custom called bossam) to a rundown of the gallows humor instilled in her mother and grandfather as the family adapted to life in post-colonial Korea. From there, Mayern moves on to her own difficult childhood, characterized by her white father's depression and her mother's resentment. After getting an abortion at 20 and realizing the pregnancy brought her "dangerously close to a life of whatever the fuck this was," Mayer fled Saipan for San Francisco in the 2000s, where she did sex work and gradually built a life for herself. In sharp-witted prose, she describes starting a family in New York City, leaving her partner, and pursuing her moonshot dream of becoming a stand-up comedian, framing each step as a move away from inherited cycles of hurt. Throughout, she's unsparing but refreshingly empathetic, especially toward her parents. This heralds the arrival of a promising new voice.
