Zarna Garg's memoir: The super-sad story of an immigrant comedian

Mint

16 hours ago

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 This American Woman: A One-in-a-Billion Memoir, and she has so much material to work with.
Those who have watched her standup routines might be already familiar with parts of this story: Garg grew up in an affluent, traditional, steeped-in-patriarchy business family in Mumbai as the youngest of four siblings in what we today call a 'blended family" (her mother was her father's second wife whom he married to look after his three older children). She was the pampered youngest till she was not—her mother died when she was 14 and her father immediately wanted to marry her off.
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Garg ran away from home and couch-surfed for two years, drifting between relatives' and friends' homes till she gave up, returned to her father's house and agreed to get married. Then, a miraculous call from a US college allowed her to get away to her step-sister in Akron, Ohio and start life all over. In someone else's hands, this could have turned into a very different kind of memoir. Though Garg was a late bloomer, having started her comedy career less than a decade ago, she decided to mine her story for its comedic potential. All female comics need a narrative Garg with her daughter Zoya. (male comics? They can get by with disjointed jokes and stray observations) and Garg's became her transformation into an American woman.
If our idea of NRI women is shaped by popular culture (and embarrassing videos of our NRI friends dressing up and dancing to Bollywood songs on every suitable and unsuitable occasion) as largely conventional people who did well in engineering college and work in IT while dealing with crushing cultural isolation, Garg defies the stereotype. Her story is full of dysfunction and uncertainty.
This material works great on stage— Garg clearly knows how to land a joke and play the audience—but does it work well as a book? Well, broad generalisations about life in India tend to do better in a stand-up setting, whether it's something as banal as bathing out of a bucket because of water rationing or more readily come dy-friendly material, such as arranged marriages. Garg is 50 and it is difficult to accept when she says, in the book, that 'in India" everyone gets married in their teens or that it's unusual for chil dren to be inter ested in books and magazines, as she was. The parts of the book that are really riveting and bene fit from Garg's sharp observation skills are the account of her relationship with her husband and their harum-scarum wed ding, and then, later in the book, the story of how she became a writer and performer of comedy.
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This section of the book—a quintessential American success story about an Indian housewife who becomes a stand-up sensation opening for the likes of Poehler and Fey—is not quite stage material, but works fantastically in this form. These are the bits comedy lovers will lap up—the kind of stuff watching five seasons of The Marvellous Mrs Maisel, about a 1950s housewife who becomes a standup comic, and Hacks, about a legendary female comedian's comeback, has primed us for. There's the story of how Garg's teen age daughter Zoya convinces her stay at-home mom to start working on comedy; the one about doing open-mic at a New York comedy club; and the details of finding her writing voice and winning a prestigious award for her first ever screenplay. What could be more American than the story of a woman who tries her hand at match making and ends up making fun of arranged marriages?
And yet, her growing up years are where her comedy essentially comes from, I think. In fact, one does not work without the other—among the first jokes Garg ever wrote was 'I am an immigrant living in America. People often wonder if I have some sad, depressing backstory. And I do."