Ali Wong’s ‘Dear Girls’ Is Better Than Your Typical Comedian Money Grab

There’s a standard formula for this. A comedian begins to take off, seemingly rising out of nowhere to become the fresh new face of comedy, and is granted a big-publisher book deal. What follows is often equally predictable: a disappointing book. Having read more than my share of them, few have enough material for an entire book, and many resort to filler content like old letters and pictures from their phone. If you’re familiar with them, you can almost pinpoint the exact page where their editor sent it back, telling them it needs to be longer than 105 pages, and the desperate recycling begins, reusing content from their comedy specials or podcasts, a doubling down on the winning content that worked to bring them this far to begin with. A refreshing change, I’m glad Dear Girls shows Ali Wong’s range by being just as funny as you expect, but also with moments of calmer sincerity that you might not see on stage. It’s insightful, interesting, and pretty damn funny, whether you’ve seen her two hit Netflix comedy specials — Baby Cobra and Hard Knock Wife — or not. Dear Girls has a fitting length, weighing in at a little over 200 pages of essays in the form of letters to her two young daughters. Those daughters — the unseen stars of her comedy specials, as she was pregnant during them — are instructed not to read it until they’re 21, which is appropriate given that Ali doesn’t hold back the raunch. The laugh-out-loud and cringeworthy moments are often simultaneous as she talks…