When What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Funny

Need to laugh out loud? To feel inspired? To feel seen? To feel encouraged to pursue your heart's most ambitious desires despite overwhelming odds against succeeding?

Read Zarna Garg's memoir, which offers an intimate, compelling coming of age, immigrant's journey, family saga, and keen observations about humans and life as experienced by a hilarious, intrepid individual.

[front cover of "Zarna Garg, This American Woman: A One-In-A-Billion Memoir" showing the Statue of Liberty holding the author in her arms with the New York City skyline in the lower half of the background]

This American Woman: A One-In-A-Billion Memoir by Zarna Garg

non-fiction memoir

Ballantine Books, April 2025

Universal themes of family love and family conflict, support and abandonment, grieving as a years' long process with lulls, parenting and being parented (or not), finding your people in friendship, romance, community presented and dissected with the author's sharp wit and insights make this memoir an entertaining and motivational read. Poignant hilarity.

Two memorable passages* (page numbers refer to hardcover library edition):

pg. 133

"I'm such a freak!" I told Shalabh later. "Why can't I do anything normal? It's like I was born to just not fit anywhere and to freak everyone out."

pg. 250

He's [Shalabh] actually a full-on Western feminist, although he doesn't realize it... But somehow it hasn't occurred to him not to treat women as equals...

*My reading, writing, and reviewing is romance-centric, which provides context for why these passages stuck with me.

This week's BAC Issues (Book Acquisition Compulsion)

[bookstack of 6 books, from top to bottom: Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of a Black Bookstore, Mate, Best Woman; bottom 3 books arranged showing only the bottom edges of their pages]

This weekend launches my extended family and me into consecutive days of loving chaos. I'm thankful for all of them and for all of you.

Wishing you an abundance of all good things that feed your body, mind, and spirit!

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