Not Exactly The Great Gatsby, Is It?

Look, I was sitting at my dining room table at 10:30 PM on a Tuesday. I had a stack of thirty-two essays on The Crucible in front of me, and if I had to read one more sentence about John Proctor's "tragic flaw," I was going to throw my red pen through the window. I needed a palate cleanser. Something that wasn't written by a dead guy. Something loud.

So I put on Tiffany Haddish's The Last Black Unicorn.

(My wife Denise walked in five minutes later, heard the language coming out of my Bluetooth speaker, and just slowly backed out of the room. Probably for the best.)

Here's the thing—I spend my life teaching kids that literature is serious business. We analyze syntax. We look for motifs. But sometimes? Sometimes you just need someone to tell you a crazy story. And honestly, nobody tells a story like Tiffany Haddish.

This Isn't Reading, It's Performing

Let's be real for a second. If you pick up the paperback version of this book, you are getting maybe 40% of the experience. Seriously. The text on the page cannot possibly capture the way this woman speaks.

As an English teacher, I'm supposed to care about diction and proper grammar. Haddish breaks every rule I teach. And it works. It works way better than half the "proper" memoirs I've trudged through. She doesn't narrate this book; she performs it. She screams, she whispers, she laughs at her own jokes before she finishes the sentence.

There are moments where she stumbles over a word or goes off-script, and they kept it in the recording. (Thank you, producers, for not scrubbing the soul out of this.) It feels like you're sitting at a dive bar with her, she's three drinks in, and she's telling you about the time she was a Bar Mitzvah hype woman. Which, by the way, is a real thing she did.

My students think "voice" in writing is some abstract concept. I should just play them Chapter 3 of this audiobook. This is voice.

The Tears of a Clown (Sorry, Had to Use a Cliché)

But it's not just jokes. And this is where the teacher in me starts analyzing things even when I promised I wouldn't.

Comedy usually comes from a dark place. (Mark Twain knew it. Richard Pryor knew it.) Haddish goes there. She talks about growing up in South Central, the foster care system, being bullied, being illiterate for a long time. It's heavy stuff. I had a similar gut-punch moment reading Becoming—Michelle Obama's honesty about her own struggles hit me the same way. There were moments—specifically when she talks about her mother's car accident and the fallout—where I had to stop grading papers and just stare at the wall.

You can hear the crack in her voice. That's the difference with the audiobook. When she recounts the abuse or the hunger, the humor drops away for a split second, and you hear the hurt running underneath. It's raw. It's uncomfortable.

Then, five seconds later, she's making a joke about revenge on an ex-boyfriend that is so filthy I would get fired if I repeated it in the faculty lounge.

Controlled Chaos

Is it perfect? No. The structure is all over the place. It's scattershot. She jumps from topic to topic like a kid on a sugar rush. If I were grading this for structure, I'd have notes in the margins.

But here's the thing: memory isn't linear. Trauma isn't linear. The chaotic structure actually fits the narrative. It feels like a brain dump in the best possible way. It's messy and loud and unpolished, and that's exactly why it works.

(Though, fair warning: if you are sensitive to explicit language or descriptions of domestic abuse, proceed with caution. This is not a cozy listen. It's a lot.)

Final Grade

I finished this in two sittings. I didn't get as many papers graded as I should have, and Principal Martinez might notice my eyes are a little red tomorrow (from laughing or crying, I'm not sure which).

If you love polished, polite celebrity memoirs where they name-drop for six hours? Skip this. But if you want to hear a survivor tell her story with absolutely zero filter, hit play. Just maybe wear headphones if your mom is around. Trust me on that one.