Ali Wong's Home Truths

COMEDIAN ALI WONG performed her two popular Netflix stand-up specials while heavily pregnant with her first and second child. The timing seemed coincidental - but it's no coincidence that her epistolary debut book Dear Girls is written explicitly for her two daughters. ''I wanted to leave something for you girls for when I die,'' she writes, ''besides a collection of oversized glasses for you to sell on eBay. These letters explore a lot of topics I wish my father and I had discussed (before he died in 2011).''

If the intention of writing the book stems from something sombre, the book is anything but. In typical crass oversharing stand-up comedian fashion, Wong proceeds to narrate a series of quirky, crude and completely unhinged episodes of her life, from how she ''trapped'' her Harvard-educated husband after a series of unsatisfying partners, to how she visited her mother's native country Vietnam and ate fertilised duck embryos (''It was practically still alive.'')

Instructive to her two young daughters - and anyone aspiring to be the next famous Asian stand-up comedian - were the years she spent on ramshackle comedy tours with other nobodies, slept in squalid hotels and bombed in clubs that doubled as laundromats. Learning how to make people laugh is hard work - make no mistake.