Ali Wong - 15 Oct

Dear Girls,

I have a secret that I never wanted anyone to know. And no, its not that I once slept with a homeless man (everybody already knows about that). Let me explain.

When I got this book deal, soon after the release of my first stand-up special, Baby Cobra, a deep panic set in. I immediately regretted signing the deal because I was terrified of the task at hand. I almost quit, conservatively, eighty times over the course of a year. A month before the first draft was due, I was moments away from giving the advance money back to the editor with a batch of balloons reading:

CONGRATULATIONS! I QUIT!

Yes, Id been scared of the workload of writing a book. But really, I was more concerned that once I wrote it and published it, everyone would find out my secretone that only my family and closest friends knew.

For three years, I was on the writing staff of the ABC sitcom Fresh Off the Boat. Every year, a producer-writer named Matt Kuhn would run a quiz before our annual staff trip to Vegas. It was meant to get us all excited about our brief escape from the fluorescent-lit office full of dry-erase boards, PC monitors, and bald white men in cargo shorts. One of my favorite questions was Bronson Pinchot, the actor who played Balki Bartokomous from Perfect Strangers: dead or alive? (spoiler: alive). The quiz was a mix of inside jokes and true, hardcore trivia.

One of the final questions in my second year on staff was How many miles to the moon? According to Google, its about 238,900 miles. Every other staff member guessed somewhere in that ballpark.

My answer was five billion miles.

The looks on my co-workers faces when they saw my terrifying guess, written on paper so there could be no mistaking it, are seared into my memory. One person took off her glasses and scream-laughed into an Ikea throw pillow for about five straight minutes. Another person just stared at me, plastered with a look of deep, sincere confusion as to how somebody so dense could have managed to graduate from college and get a job, let alone perform the basic functions of life such as remembering to breathe and wipe from front to back. It was like a bomb had exploded in the room and people suddenly suspected that there was a wizard operating my brain for my entire life and they caught a moment when he was on lunch break.

Some of my peers thought the answer was so ridiculous that I was just trying to be funny. But I wasnt trying to be funny. I was legitimately trying to win the quiz and get the cash prize of five hundred dollars to spend immediately upon landing in Vegas on buffets and VIP tickets to Magic Mike Live.

That day, my co-workers found out my secret: Im a fucking idiot.

There are some major and wildly concerning gaps in my knowledge and abilities. I have a very hard time distinguishing an Australian person from a British person unless I get a good look in their mouth. No matter how many times someone explains it to me, I will never understand when to appropriately use whom instead of whoits simply beyond my capabilities, sadly. My nephew beat me at chess in three moves when I was thirty and he was in preschool. Then I beat him in checkers (by cheating), I over-celebrated and gloated, and he gave me a look that said, Wow, good for you, and waddled to the childs potty in his room to go poo. I do not know the difference between a crocodile and an alligator or a turtle and a tortoise or a sandwich and a panini. I believe it sounds like the ocean when you hold certain seashells up to your ear because you can take the seashell out of the ocean, but you cant take the ocean out of a seashell. I know thats not scientifically correct, but Im too lazy to learn the real explanation behind the magic. Im still not sure if Pluto is a planet or not, and I dont understand what a secretary of state does or why its called a secretary (do they arrange FedEx pickups and have extramarital affairs with the state?). When a friend recently texted me that R. Kelly had been indicted, I had to google What is the meaning of indicted?

And so, with this published book, I was understandably afraid of the whole world knowing this. I confessed this to Sarah Dunn, author of The Arrangement and creator of the ABC sitcom American Housewife. She told me, Just accept that youre not a genius. Once I told myself that, I was able to finally write.

I felt so much better after my talk with her and got comfortable with the fact that Im not Tolstoy. Im not Salman Rushdie. Then I realized something better: Nobody expects me to be Salman Rushdie, or even Padma Lakshmi. (Hi, Padma, if youre reading! Love you on Top Chef! Quickfire queen!) And in all honesty, Salman Rushdie is boring and very difficult for the average person (me!) to get through without a teacher to guide one (me again!) through all the dense writing and big words. Also, up until recently, when Id hear his name, I thought he was a type of fish.

I am not Maya Angelou. I am not Malcolm Gladwell. People shit on Dan Brown, and Im no Dan Brown. Hell, Im not even that fat mustache guy who faked his memoir and got yelled at by Oprah. Im a stand-up comedian thats famous enough now to receive a free Nike tracksuit and get harassed for pictures when I go out to eat ramen. Im a five-foot-tall girl from the San Francisco Bay who has always loved making people laugh. I got a 1200 on my SATs. Im your mother. I dont write fancy. I dont use words like facetious or effusive. I use words like doo-doo, caca, and punani. Once I embraced that, these letters were an absolute pleasure to write.

The idea for this book is inspired mostly by a note from my father that began with Dear Alexandra. He had left it for me in a sealed envelope before he passed away. He had been battling cancer and depression for a while, and he knew he was going to die soon. In it, he told me he loved me and promised I would have a great life. He thanked me for exercising with him in the park while he was sick and couldnt walk so well. Im very grateful for the letter, but I wish he had written more about himself. There are so many questions I still have for himabout how he overcame all the challenges in his youth and about the person he was before I was born.