The Last Black Unicorn

Course language, hearty laughs, funny voices, tales of domestic violence, and hope for a future career. That’s what you can expect from Tiffany Haddish’s memoir, The Last Black Unicorn. It is definitely more of a memoir of her life becoming famous and skimps on the details of her career, especially her starting points, but ultimately lets you know this on-the-rise comedienne and actress more and more and start to appreciate how far she has come from where she began.

Something I appreciated about this book is how open Tiffany was to sharing her life story with the world. She didn’t shy away from the dirty details or try and keep things private. She didn’t name-drop and blast people who had wronged her, but she talked openly about her rough childhood, her mother’s mental illness stemming from a car accident, her issues with her own appearance, her abortion, her abusive ex-husband, and even her time as a pimp. Yes, I said pimp. More on that in a second. While I would have loved for this book to be longer or have focused more on Tiffany’s career and how she really got her start, I admired her willingness to open up about the tough things in life, make them funnier with some great voices, and find the silver lining to get the heck out.

I’m not going to lie though, I feel like Tiffany really missed an opportunity to talk about her career, how she got her start, and all that jazz, because the audience is here and we are interested in her career. Tiffany talks about going to Laugh Factor Comedy Camp as a child in foster care and performing as a kind of hype man at bar mitzvahs, but then she jumps to a time when the man she was about to marry stalked her in New Orleans while she was working on a movie. But…hello, Tiffany…talk about how you landed that movie! Or how you got to work on Girls Trip, which really launched you into the mainstream culture! I think that was the biggest flaw with this book.

Some warning for this book: there is really course language, talk of abortion, talk of domestic violence, explicit talk about sex, etc. I’m not saying these should turn you away from the book, because I do think it is really interesting and has some truly funny parts, but maybe don’t listen to the audiobook out loud in your office…