The super-sad life story of comedian Zarna Garg

This American Woman: A One-in-a-Billion Memoir: By Zarna Garg, Penguin Random House India, 320 pages, ₹799

- Shrabonti Bagchi

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you are a female American comedian of any standing, you must write a memoir. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler have written best-selling ones, Mindy Kaling has written no fewer than three, and chances are every female comic you've heard of, from Ellen Degeneres to Hannah Gadsby, Caitlin Moran and Ali Wong, has had a memoir out. Obviously, at some point, someone in publishing decided that this was a bankable genre and guided by the spirit of the late, great Nora Ephron, went full steam ahead. I'm not complaining here; I've read Fey, Poehler and Kaling and they were all immensely satisfying.

Beyond such cynical calculations, however, I think the reason comedy memoirs work is because all of us who consume comedy are seeking to answer one question: where does comedy come from? Male comedians observe people around them from a great height and find them absurd; female comedians examine the absurdity of their own lives with a microscope and turn the sad bits into funny bits.

This is what Zarna Garg does with