1. Introduction: The Memoir Boom, Extreme Publishing, and Celebrity Book Culture

1As of spring 2023, several popular memoirs were on the receiving end of widespread media attention. Alongside memoirs by Pamela Anderson and Paris Hilton, former Nickelodeon star Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022) was exhibiting surprising staying power on the New York Times bestseller list: 36 weeks and counting. McCurdy, known for her funny, off-beat performances on Nickelodeon shows iCarly (2007–2012) and Sam & Cat (2013–2014) wrote a one-woman show with the same title as the memoir to cope with the trauma and abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother in her childhood. McCurdy performed the one-woman show in Los Angeles before the pandemic closed theaters and thwarted her plans for a tour. The memoir offered her a space to re-use the material as well as the opportunity to extend it. The result is a humorous but also strangely moving self-reflection, offering behind-the-scenes insights into childhood stardom and its pitfalls. The result is also, however, as this article will show, a huge boost for McCurdy’s brand as a (former) comedic actor, as well as for her pocketbook.

2Over the past ten-odd years, roughly since the publication of Tina Fey’s Bossypants in 2011, stand-up comedians and comedic actors have increasingly found their way between the covers of countless books, with the vast majority of titles belonging to the memoir genre, though some could also be described as collections of personal or autobiographical essays, for instance Anna Kendrick’s Scrappy Little Nobody (2016) or Phoebe Robinson’s Please Don’t Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes (2021). Importantly, as Erica Lies notes, these memoirs are not retrospectives after a full career but rather written while their authors are “still very much in the spotlight” (Lies). While much scholarly attention has been afforded to questions of autobiography and memoir, literary studies scholarship has mostly skirted around popular celebrity memoirs. Hannah Yelin’s monograph Celebrity Memoir is a welcome exception. As she emphasizes, “A thorough interrogation of the memoirs of contemporary, female celebrities is urgent and necessary” (1). She continues: “Their enormous popularity, commercial success and resultant cultural impact are grounds for investigation in their own right” (2). As a particular sub-set of celebrity, comedians and comedic actors and their memoirs have not found much scholarly attention, either. However, there is indication that this is changing. Life writing scholars Laurie McNeill and John David Zuern recently edited a special issue on the “particular fit of auto|biography and comedy for texts and subjects in both traditional comedy settings (such as stand-up performances and comedy specials) and print (such as memoir);” with their introduction as well as their contributors offering fresh insights into “what is produced through the intersection of these modes” (227).

3This article offers a first consideration of popular celebrity memoirs by female comedians or comedic actors from the vantage point of book studies, seeking to remedy the gap in the research literature with its focus on books-as-commodities and books-as-objects. The article will position what I call the female comedian memoir as a product of intersecting conditions: 1) the memoir boom, 2) extreme publishing, and 3) celebrity book culture. I introduce the term female comedian memoir, acknowledging that there are myriad other ways of describing the type of books I will be looking at (for instance, Erica Lies describes them as “hybrid humor/not-quite-memoirs” [Lies]).

4Methodologically speaking, book studies borrows heavily from cultural sociology as well as from history and literary studies, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches. These approaches may be effectively deployed to explore the following questions: Where are the productive overlaps between the comedic sector and the publishing industry? Given the large number of memoirs penned (or co-penned) by women in the comedy sector over the past decade, what can we derive from these books for a broader understanding of the industry? How do the book publications contribute to the brand acts (see Koegler 130-139) of the actors and comedians? How are questions of diversity negotiated in the booming comedian memoir industry?

5From Bossypants to Hannah Gadsby’s Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation (2022), writing “a book has… become part of a contemporary female comedian’s brand” (Evans 158). For the actors themselves, the books offer a new, additional revenue stream, heightened media attention, and perhaps something more. As Evans explains, for female comedians in particular, memoirs offer a platform to put certain discussions surrounding the “funniness” of female comedians (for contexts, see Lockyer 2020) to rest:

Women comedians must be exhausted from having to repeatedly account for their success to the media, something that their male counterparts are rarely asked to do. Writing a memoir therefore becomes a useful way of ‘explaining’ the phenomenon of the successful, funny woman. In each of the celebrity memoirs discussed, the women writers use humor to transgress socio-political concepts of women, to challenge patriarchal assumptions about female success, and to entertain the reader, as these memoirs are all well written and sharply observed. In these women writers’ hands, comedy is a powerful weapon for feminist commentary, and the act of writing itself is inherently political. (156)

6Sandra Tsing Loh, in a New York Times review of Amy Poehler’s Yes, Please (2014), observes that there are “enough comedian memoirs published… that we can classify them in two genres.” Tsing Loh differentiates between “old school” comedian memoirs, such as those by Joan Rivers, which “mock[ ] celebrities, celebrate[ ] bad attitudes and extol[ ] plastic surgery,” and ‘new school’ comedian memoirs such as Bossypants, which Tsing Loh describes as “fearsomely witty and polished” as well as “wry” and “self-deprecating.” Importantly, Lies notes that the “old school” memoirs, written towards the end or after one’s career, offer authors the chance to criticize the entertainment industry more easily and at less risk (Lies).

7For readers and fans, the books grant access to their favorite comedians, seemingly beyond the well-lit stage and camera persona. Tsing Loh seems to suggest that the memoirs can also offer their readers “smart, ‘Lean In’-worthy advice” on how to manage a successful career (Tsing Loh). For publishers, the books offer an excellent opportunity for bestselling success. To understand the success story of female comedian memoirs more fully, we need to consider the three main developments that feed into this phenomenon: first, the memoir boom, second, extreme publishing, and third, celebrity book culture.

8The memoir boom is ongoing and impossible to deny. One of the few real areas of growth and success in the book industry over the past decade has been the memoir sector, particularly in the anglophone book industries (for contexts, see Rak 6–11; for recent examples, see Harris and Alter 2022). Within the memoir segment, female memoir (sometimes reductively called “femoir,” see also Evans 157) is a broad-strokes category which has seen enormous popularity with readers over the past decade. However, especially in American and British contexts, the popular memoir is often associated with supermarket sales and a wide but undiscerning audience. But as recent scholarship has shown, the memoir can be a complex and capacious genre, and there are plenty of memoirs by “capital L” literary authors such as Rachel Cusk and Hilary Mantel to prove it. Even while acknowledging that the memoir genre can mean “ghost-written accounts of celebrities and politicians that populate best-seller lists, the shelves of airport bookstores, and your local Barnes & Noble,” Daniel Worden writes that the ‘memoir boom’ can tell “us much more than that our culture fetishizes the individual as the focal point of social meaning, success, and failure.… [T]he memoir may signal the possibility of redirecting the individual and its valences in other directions. In the 2000s, and today, the memoir was, and is, an important mode for understanding our contemporary moment and how to live within and, one hopes, beyond it” (135).

9Beyond literary criticism and scholarship—or even, perhaps, chronologically speaking, before—lies the world of publishing with its sales expectations and marketing strategies. Memoirs, novels, non-fiction: all of these are packaged as “several kinds of commodities” (Joshi 219). As Worden emphasizes, “memoir [is becoming] more important as a marketing category than it [is] as a literary category” (135). From a publishing standpoint, too, the term memoir is a commodious category, which encompasses a wide scope of texts, from serious to trashy, from popular to niche, even if one only looks as far as the trade sector and ignores the burgeoning bulk of memoirs that are self-published via platforms such as Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing.

10G. Thomas Couser writes that total sales in the categories of Personal Memoirs, Childhood Memoirs, and Parental Memoirs increased more than 400 percent between 2004 and 2008 (3, quoting Yagoda’s numbers). In 2015, over 30% of surveyed American readers said that they had read at least one memoir in the past year (Harris Interactive). And in early 2020, Publishers Weekly reported that the US-based “National Association of Memoir Writers, founded by Linda Joy Myers in 2007, has seen its membership double in the past several years” (B. Warner). All of this is anecdotal evidence to support the ubiquity and popularity of memoirs: in creative writing courses and publisher slush piles, in bookstores and in libraries, in the review pages of minor as well as major newspapers, and on bookshelves and nightstands.

11In her groundbreaking 2013 work Boom!, Julie Rak posits that we need to “change the way that we have understood memoirs so that we can see them as part of a production cycle.” As Rak emphasizes, “understanding how the book industry works today can help us see why the production of non-fiction has assumed so much importance” (4). This prompt—very much in line with book studies methodology—leads us to a closer consideration of what sociologist John B. Thompson has called extreme publishing. Thompson has, in two larger works, explained in detail how publishing works today. Both Merchants of Culture (2^nd ed. 2012) and Book Wars (2021) are based on qualitative interviews with industry insiders as well as on quantitative data from publishers. Thompson’s books explore how big books are needed in conglomerate publishing to hit revenue targets and to generate income to cross-subsidize titles that are less likely to sell extremely well. Anglophone publishing is dominated overwhelmingly by corporate publishers. In the US, there are five major publishers, called the big five (formerly the big six). A recent attempt by Bertelsmann/Penguin Random House to merge with Simon & Schuster was blocked (Harris, Alter & Mullin). In a highly corporatized and competitive publishing environment, which is also vying for customers’ attention in a supercharged media landscape, books usually have to make a big splash quickly to sell well: “The neoliberal principles that influence publishing reflect the branding and corporate interests of the parent companies; this has led to the polarization of the market, with an increasing emphasis on best-selling authors” (Ramdarshan Bold 426). Typically, there is a sales window of only a few weeks, though there can be surprise long-sellers with unexpected staying power, and sometimes, books can resurface due to online recommendation culture (for context, see Fuller and Rehberg Sedo 2023).

13These activities fall under the general trend towards celebrity book culture. While several scholars of book and publishing studies have touched upon the trend, there is still an acute need for a wider critical analysis of celebrity book culture which could draw on theoretical work such as Richard Dyer’s star theory (for context, see Holmes) as well as on existing work on literary celebrity by Joe Moran, Lorraine York, and Loren Glass. As Ramdarshan Bold discusses in relation to the children’s book industry, celebrity book culture has left its mark on the industry at large, putting increasing pressure on other involved actors. Not only do celebrities “notoriously, earn large advance payments for their writing, whether it is fiction, nonfiction, or even ghostwritten (which is often the case),” but the “print runs for celebrity books are generally higher” than for other books, so that the royalties will tend to be higher in addition to the advance payments (Ramdarshan Bold 428).

14Significantly, we need to differentiate between literary celebrity or literary celebrity authorship (as formulated by Franssen and Honings) and mere celebrity authorship: but both play an important role in the industry today. A literary celebrity, briefly put, has achieved stardom through their work as an author. Celebrity authorship, on the other hand, denotes celebrities from other sectors (sports, media, politics, comedy) choosing books and authorship as a new creative venue (and revenue stream). For memoirs, specifically, at the intersection of the memoir boom, celebrity book culture, and the logics of big books, author platform is key: “Writers who aspire to make it big as memoirists need to understand that the industry is obsessed with author platform: without one, the likelihood of landing a book deal for a memoir is abysmally low” (B. Warner).

15Celebrity book culture is often criticized by the literary establishment in connection with the idea that big books squander opportunities for other types of books. This overt criticism extends to the comedian memoir as a “memoir microtrend” (Lies). Robert Collins, in The Telegraph, quips about memoir as “a literary genre that has been hijacked by a swarm of comedians, television presenters and reality-show contestants who have come to saturate the art of autobiography” (qtd. in Rak 13). In The New York Times, Zinoman writes “the most popular literary form in comedy is the memoir, perfectly suited for beach and bathroom reads. These are typically around 250 breezy pages that mix ‘Can you believe I’m writing a book?’ jokes with shoptalk and self-deprecating confessions. The ambitions are somewhere between a long magazine piece and a talk show interview” (Zinoman). Clearly, these journalists are perpetuating stereotypes about the genre instead of unpacking them. It is important to acknowledge the role of the publisher in the creation of these products.

16In 2009, Publishers Weekly asked the comedian Kathy Griffin why she had chosen to publish a memoir. The trade journal is quoted as asking, “You’re a comedian, so why do a memoir instead of, say, a humor book?” Her answer was pragmatic and honest: “[Random House] said they wanted a memoir.” Griffin believed that “nobody’s gonna buy a book if it’s just… standup printed.” Her approach was to write “a sort of hybrid—part memoir, part humor book.” But then, as she explained, she “found out that in your world [i.e., the world of publishing] it’s all about the categories” (qtd. in Deahl 2009). As Couser writes, in the twenty-first century, it has usually been the publishers who play an “aggressive role… in eliciting, developing, and marketing memoirs” (145)—so if anyone “hijacked a genre,” to come back to Collins’ criticism above, it was the publishers themselves.

17Publishers have admittedly diluted the genre because celebrity books are often last-minute decisions, gap fillers to improve the company’s bottom line before the end of the year. This “short-termist mentality,” can lead to what Thompson calls “bad publishing.” Thompson continues,

You don’t have to be a cultural snob to see that a good number of the books that are put together in great haste—often ghostwritten ‘autobiographies’ of celebrities or heavily illustrated gossip… —and published quickly in the hope that they will fill a budget gap are not books that add much to the cultural well-being (or even, for that matter, the entertainment) of the human race. (380)

18Fiction author Leland Cheuk acknowledged the celebrity memoir boom in a conflicted way in 2019: “Writers of literary fiction are supposed to disdain celebrity memoirs,” writes Cheuk, because “[t]hey’re sucking up all the big advances and lowering the bar of what’s supposed to be Literature.” However, as he admits, memoirs by comedians are his “dirty reading secret” (Cheuk). From Thompson’s “bad publishing” to Cheuk’s “dirty reading secret,” the language used to describe these types of books can be judgmental and problematic, especially in relation to memoirs by women. As Yelin emphasizes, “the centrality of gender to the derision of the genre is clear and extends to its female readership” (14–15).

2. The Female Comedian Memoir: A Lucrative Brand Act

19While nobody can guarantee a bestseller, “Celebrity memoirs and advice [are] as safe as it gets in publishing,” which means these are the types of titles that “end up in the lead title slots season after season” (V. Warner). Within this framework, female comedians and publishers enter a symbiotic relationship, simultaneously building and reinforcing each other’s brands. In Caroline Koegler’s parsing, the female comedian memoir is a brand act that stands alongside other brand acts such as TV and live appearances or social media for the author (see 130-139), but it is also a brand act for the publisher, which can funnel memoirs into dedicated imprints specialized in maximizing reader and media attention.

20HarperCollins has one such imprint. Formerly called It Books, the original imprint name was on the nose: the goal was to focus “on pop culture, sports, style and content derived from the Internet” (Rich). Today, the imprint is called Dey Street Books, specializing in “irreverent books” and “celebrity memoirs” (Deahl 2014). It Books/Dey Street Books have published memoirs by comedians Lisa Lampanelli and Amy Poehler (2018), as well as by comedic actor Gabrielle Union (2019 and 2022). Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey from the hit US adaptation of The Office (2005-2013) recently released a co-written memoir The Office BFFs. Tales of The Office from Two Best Friends Who Were There (2022), which also fits squarely into the category of humorous memoirs by female comedians or comedic actors.

21The New York Times wrote about Mindy Kaling’s second memoir and Amy Schumer’s book that they were part of a “growing canon of memoir-slash-essay collections by women comedians and comedy writers”—and selling “in the zillions.” There seemed to be “something about the combination that’s working” (Chocano). That something is a hefty mix of marketing, self-promotion, and publishing strategy, coupled with highly recognizable personas, catering (in particular) to what publishers imagine the average book buyer to look like: a white, middle-class, middle-aged woman—also known as “Susan” in the book trade (Cowdrey).

22In addition to the marketing and recognizability, comedians might have a different level of writing experience than “regular” celebrities who are penning memoirs. Depending on their process, some comedians can be writers by trade. The often essayistic, episodic form of their books mirrors the fact that comedians “are used to thinking in episodes; they’re used to thinking in skits.” There is also another, very pragmatic reason for this essayistic form: “[Fey, Kaling, and Dunham] were actively involved in making shows at the time they were writing these books, so they had to grab time when they could… You can knock something off in a week, when you have downtime, then come back a few weeks later and knock off something else” (Bledenharn). Evans, analyzing memoirs by Lena Dunham, Mindy Kaling, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, explains: “The narrative structure of each text is largely similar.” Each book is “composed of chapters made up of essays, lists, and emails. The narrative tone of all these texts is designed to be confessional and intimate, following the established style of the female essayist” (161). Besides focusing on short episodes and chapters, another way to speed up the writing process is to assign a ghostwriter. Tiffany Haddish’s bestseller The Last Black Unicorn (2017) was co-written by an unlikely partner, Tucker Max, best known for his contributions to the short-lived “fratire” genre of books, such as I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell (2006). The collaboration was confirmed by the publisher Simon & Schuster, though Haddish declined to comment (Bennett).

23Contributing to the brand acts for the comedian or comedic actor is the cross-media value creation through audio books, in particular. The audio book reinforces the authenticity of the text and boosts sales and media attention. In the past, there have been pre-releases of the audio versions in “an effort to build buzz… and capture consumers of all stripes… days before the printed version hits bookstore shelves” (Rich 2007). Not every author is a good audio narrator. A gifted comedian or comedic actor with a recognizable voice and cadence, however, reading their own stories, is an entirely different matter: “Reading speeds vary, as does the-voice-in-your-head-when-you-read, but the audiobook allows a listener to hear the jokes as they were meant to be delivered” (Orr). In a 2021 New York Times article titled “When Listening to a Book is Better Than Reading It,” this selling point is emphasized:

I have been telling everyone I know to listen to ‘The Last Black Unicorn,’ the comedian Tiffany Haddish’s account of her rough childhood in the foster system and the many hardships she endured on the way to making it big in show business. Her narrative is compelling enough, but she is one of the best stand-up comedians working today, so it’s hardly a surprise that the tragedy and the hilarity of her story are punched up by her delivery in the audiobook.… I pity anyone who only read Haddish’s text[.] (Manjoo)

24Despite a wealth of prior memoir-ish publications by female comedians, the book which arguably kick-started the current boom of comedy memoirs written by women was Tina Fey’s Bossypants (2011) which continues to be popular and well-received. The prospect of a memoir authored by Tina Fey caused a flurry in the industry well before the public heard about it, culminating in a bidding war between publishers in which Little, Brown (Hachette Book Group) committed to paying a 6-million-dollar advance. Reportedly, part of the advance was donated to charity. Nonetheless, the bidding war and the sizable advance gave potential celebrity authors a new benchmark to work with, and publishers had to follow suit.

25In February 2021, The New York Times published what they said was a “syllabus of sorts for exploring some of the funniest books of all time”: Bossypants made the list (Zinoman 2021). It has sold over 2.5 million copies by 2014, and the audiobook version, which was narrated by Fey herself and received a Grammy nomination as well as the “Audie,” was downloaded from Audible.com over 150,000 times within the first year of publication. Even for a “memoirified” industry, in which “[n]othing gets a publisher’s chequebook out faster than a memoir” (Freeman), these numbers are eye-popping, and to my knowledge, no other female comedian memoir has hit the jackpot quite as successfully as Bossypants. Zinoman goes as far to say that Fey’s impact on the book world outshines her television career. That is perhaps an overstatement, but Fey’s success led to a bustle of offers for other female comedian memoirs, and the advances paid now are often in the millions.

26Another example of the heightened attention given to female comedians’ memoirs is Amy Schumer. Schumer received a 1-million-dollar advance from HarperCollins in 2013, presumably from It Books/Dey Street Books, but since her progress was slow even with a co-writer (Patricia Marx), she cancelled the deal and paid back the advance. Only two years and an Emmy win later, her clout and visibility—her brand—had risen to the point where, after an embattled bidding war, Simon & Schuster paid her an advance over $8 million (Alter). Of course, only big conglomerate publishers are able to participate in these types of bidding wars.

27With Fey’s book, the publisher struck publishing gold: 38,000 copies were sold in the first week. Within the first year of publication, Bossypants was sold over one million times, meaning that the advance was easily “earned out” within less than a year. Amy Poehler’s advance was reportedly “in the low seven figures;” clearly, the publishers were “aiming for a slice of the lucrative Bossypants pie.” The marketing efforts seem to have paid off: Poehler moved 37,000 copies in the first week of sales (Lewis). Poehler’s book Yes Please “hit that high-six-figure-to-one-million-copies [sales] mark” within less than a year and is still in print (Bledenharn).

3. Prizing Female Comedian Memoirs: A Brief Case Study of the Goodreads Choice Awards

28From a reader’s and book-buyer’s vantagepoint, a short, popular memoir by a female comedian is an ideal, low-risk, spontaneous choice at a superstore like Target or in bookstore chains and other points of sale. The books are usually easy to read and can give their readers a behind-the-scenes, (pseudo-)intimate sense of getting to know and identify with someone who is usually on stage or on screen. The memoirs are a great option for gift-giving among friends, or for communal reading in book clubs, but also possibly a segue (back) into the world of books for people who are simply comedy fans. It is probable, based on market data on readers and book-buyers generally, that the readers are often female themselves, enhancing the sense of identification. However, exploring this connection between the gender of the memoir author and that of the readers and buyers goes beyond the horizon of this article (on gender, memoir and genre, see for instance Couser 2011, 42).

29Researching readers and reading bears its own challenges, also well beyond the scope of this article. Though Goodreads readers are not representative of any particular group of readers, the platform grants us an interesting glimpse of reception processes, as scholars such as DeNel Rehberg Sedo and Beth Driscoll (2019) and Simone Murray (2021) have demonstrated. As Melanie Walsh and Maria Antoniak remind us, however, “Goodreads data is… a boon for corporations” as well as for researchers and book culture (Walsh and Antoniak 2021). Keeping this caveat in mind, I will conclude with a short case study of the Goodreads Choice Award, in particular in the category “Humor.”

30The award is essentially an online popularity contest for books, and Goodreads markets the awards as the “only major book awards decided by readers,” indicating a shift of power in clear opposition to other literary awards: from the gatekeepers to the ‘actual’ readers. The award was founded in 2009, two years after the launch of Goodreads, though the website only archives the data for the award from 2011 onwards. All registered users of Goodreads can vote on nominated books in a range of categories. The eligibility criteria are straightforward: nominated books must have a rating of at least 3.50/5 stars on Goodreads at time of nomination. Goodreads then analyzes “statistics from the millions of books added, rated, and reviewed… to nominate the books.” The voting runs in November and into December of a given year, with winners announced in December, giving the books extra exposure in the run-up to the holiday gift-giving season. Thus, while there is no financial award, the sales effect is probably significant, at least for the winning titles. Of course, the number of votes achieved is contingent on a wide range of factors, and not indicative of critical reception, or sales, or quality. However, as a brief case study, the numbers offer an interesting glimpse of readers’ reactions and preferences.

31“Humor” was launched as an extra category in 2010. In 2011, Bossypants was the first female comedian memoir to win the Goodreads Choice Award in that category. In 2011, participation was only a fraction of what it is today: 638,603 votes were cast across all categories. Last year, for the 2022 iteration, 5,779,854 votes were cast across all categories. This was the highest-ever level of participation, giving an indication of the award’s trajectory and popularity among Goodreads users (Goodreads Choice Awards). In 2011, Bossypants (8,722 votes) received more than four times as many votes as Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (2011) by Mindy Kaling (2,110 votes) and Seriously… I’m Kidding (2011) by Ellen Degeneres (1,923 votes), which were both published in the same year. Since then, overwhelmingly, the ‘Humor’ category of this award has been dominated by female comedian memoirs. In the 12 years of the award’s existence thus far, eight winners have belonged to this particular sub-genre of humor, if we parse the category capaciously to include Lauren Graham as well.

32Table 1: Award-winning female comedian memoirs, Goodreads Choice Award, 2009 to 2022

33In 2022, female comedian memoirs had a particularly strong showing in the category “Humor.” It is possible, though hard to confirm, that COVID lockdowns motivated more comedic actors and comedians, bereft of live audiences, to write memoirs—much like the example of Jennette McCurdy cited at the beginning of this article. Besides the award-winning book by Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey, five other comedian memoirs were in the running in 2022: Molly Shannon’s Hello, Molly! A Memoir (2022) (19,443 votes) and Hannah Gadsby’s Ten Steps to Nanette. A Memoir Situation (2022) (19,214 votes) achieved practically the same number of votes. Laura Clery’s Idiots. Marriage, Motherhood, Milk & Mistakes (2022) (17,979 votes) was in a similar vicinity. Anjelah Johnson-Reyes’ memoir was also nominated, but only received limited votes. The title of her memoir already sets hers apart from the other nominees in referencing her mixed-race heritage: Who Do I Think I Am? Stories of Chola Wishes and Caviar Dreams (2022) (3,275 votes). A final comedian memoir picks up on themes referenced by Clery’s book: Natasha Leggero’s memoir is titled The World Deserves My Children (2022) (1,861 votes). Clery and Leggero are both foregrounding motherhood, but in very different ways. While Clery is depicted on the cover heavily pregnant and naked except for hair curlers, Leggero is shown wearing a dramatic red evening gown and doing dishes in a messy kitchen with apocalyptic scenes outside the window. Sharon Lockyer and Sara De Benedictis have recently analyzed the individualized representation and structural ambivalence of performing stand-up comedy about pregnancy while pregnant (2023). The timelines in publishing mean that the focus of the books is shifted; they are, after all, more like post-pregnancy books than offering the immediacy and intimacy of what Lockyer and De Benedictis call “pregnant stand-up comedy.” Their analysis of the complexities of creating content in the comedy industry while pregnant and navigating early motherhood, however, are valuable for the memoirs as well.

34It is obvious that the list of award-winners above skews heavily towards white female comedians or comedic actors. This is in keeping with recent scholarship that has emphasized the systemic racism in the publishing industry (for the US industry, see So 2020, Nishikawa 2021; for wider contexts, see Dane 2023 and Koegler and Norrick-Rühl 2023). As Dane explains, history and autobiography/memoir have “traditionally [been] the genres where Black authors and authors of colour were afforded more opportunities from the almost exclusively White publishing houses and institutions” (Dane 63); there are no clear numbers, however, for the overlap between memoir and humor. Relatedly, there are discussions about the lack of opportunities for Black comedians and comedic actors, and some of the most prominent (memoir-writing) comedians mentioned in this article; Tina Fey and Amy Schumer, in particular, have been criticized for their “brand of white feminism that contains awkward engagements with race” (Colpean and Tully 161-162).

35In this vein, it is also interesting to note that in 2020, Chloé Hilliard was nominated with her memoir F*ck Your Diet and Other Things My Thighs Tell Me (2020) (16,176 votes) but lost by a long shot to cartoonist Nathan W. Pyle’s Strange Planet (2019) (45,156 votes). This is despite an overwhelming interest in books by Black authors in 2020 with social media campaigns such as #BlackoutBestsellerLists running as part of the ripple effect of wider attention for #BlackLivesMatter after George Floyd’s murder (see, e.g., Wheeler 2020, de Léon and Harris 2020). In the following year, Phoebe Robinson was nominated with her book Please Don’t Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes. Essays (2021) (15,261 votes) but lost to Jenny Lawson’s Broken (2021) (26,788 votes). It is too much of a stretch to claim that female comedian memoirs by Black comedians in general do not find as much favor with Goodreads audiences, but it can certainly be noted that the widespread attention garnered by white female comedian memoirs is not achieved by those memoirs published by comedians and comedic actors of color. Further analysis of Goodreads comments and ratings could be conducted to find out more precisely how taste-making on Goodreads interacts with questions of representation and (lack of) diversity in the creative industries, though Goodreads has recently restricted access to older comments and reviews, making research more difficult.

36We can segue from here back to McCurdy’s memoir. Billed by Goodreads as “Maybe the single biggest surprise success of the year,” McCurdy’s book was not nominated in the “Humor” category. It was, however, nominated in the category “Memoir & Autobiography,” where it won by a stunning margin, garnering 202,606 of 374,518 votes. For the sake of comparison within this category: Alan Rickman’s diaries came in a far second (40,603 votes). The winner in the “Humor” category achieved around 37k votes, meaning that McCurdy received more than five times as many votes. One point this emphasizes is that the choice of category matters immensely: Rickman’s memoir, coming in second, still had 2.2k more votes than the winning book in the “Humor” category. Another point this drives home, though, is that despite all the planning of big books, and despite the enormous financial efforts of (mostly big five) publishers to perfect the logics of extreme publishing, there is still an element of serendipity to publishing (memoir, humor, or otherwise) that cannot be accounted for. As Yelin emphasizes, it is important to understand “memoir in the context of its collaborative authorship and the industrial conditions of construction without dismissing these texts as solely the cynical manufacture of corporate merchandise” (278). Coming off the success of the book, McCurdy was able to close a two-book, seven-figure deal with the (non-conglomerate) publisher Ultra Literary (Deahl 2022). The first of the two books has been announced as an untitled debut novel, showcasing the fact that a popular memoir success can act as a door-opener for other genres.

3. Conclusions and Outlook

37As this article has shown, female comedian memoirs, in particular by white female comedians and comedic actors, are at the heart of developments and trends within the book industry, from the memoir boom to celebrity book culture and extreme publishing. Female comedians are highly sought-after as potential authors, and actively courted by big conglomerate publishers, who are the only kind of publishers that have the necessary means to make attractive (often seven-figure) offers. Fey’s Bossypants set the benchmark for success, and the award-winning, cash-cow combination of “the-comedic-memoir-plus-audio-book-narrated-by-said-comedian” thus became firmly established in the book world. Despite attempts by publishers, and embattled bidding wars for comedian’s memoirs, that original benchmark has proven difficult to replicate, though several (white) female comedians have come close to Fey’s success. It is also necessary to consider these female comedian memoirs in comparison to memoirs by other (male or non-binary) comedians in future research.

38Further research is also needed to understand the connections between the memoir and the popularity of streaming specials, which comedians have benefitted from both during and after the lockdown era. The ideal timing between the release of a comedic streaming special and a memoir could be studied. For instance, Ali Wong’s two Netflix specials were filmed during her pregnancies and released in 2016 and 2018, and notably, her 2019 memoir Dear Girls is framed as letters to the two children, immediately creating a link between the two specials and the book. By this token, we might soon expect memoirs by Taylor Tomlinson (Netflix special released in 2020) or Sommore (Netflix special released in 2023). Further research is also necessary to unpack the questions of representation and diversity—and lack thereof— in the genre. The popular celebrity memoir is, as Yelin writes, “a microcosmic cultural artefact with much to tell us about celebrity culture at large” (279), and thus can act as a focal point in this regard. The brief case study of one category of the Goodreads Choice Awards has illustrated the potential of the data, and critical analysis of the award, its logics and effects would be most welcome.

39That said, the book studies approach has proven fruitful in positioning the female comedian memoir within a larger cultural framework. We can identify the female comedian memoir as part of a complex of brand acts performed by comedians within a highly corporatized media environment. The simultaneous audio book narration complements and enhances the brand act performed through the memoir. For the comedians, participating in the literary field certainly offers additional revenue, but also (in a best-case scenario) a new form of creative and artistic output. Despite their celebrity status, the role of published author is a new role that they can explore and grow into, and they can leverage the memoir genre to connect to fans and general readers.