The funniest memoir for your summer road trip

Drive and laugh like a crazy person.

Jul 04, 2025

When I tell you that I’ve listened to my share of memoirs for the last decade of my life, I know what a unicorn memoir is—and folks… THIS IS IT.

Leslie F*cking Jones

I once heard a Fresh Air interview with Leslie Jones, the comedian best known for being on Saturday Night Live and Ghostbusters, and thought… wow, she is so… enlightened. I was impressed with her wisdom and positive energy.

Leslie is in her 50s, and I liked that she experienced life and didn’t actually “become famous,” as she says, until she was 47. There’s much to appreciate about someone who works their ass off and keeps trying at that age. To me, it feels different than a 20-something who gets discovered and shoots to stardom.

On the podcast, Leslie talked about having to bury her parents and her brother, who tragically died at 38. (After listening to her book, stories about her brother reminded me about my brother. Coincidentally, my brother is 38.)

So when I saw the audiobook in my library app, I was like yes! I thought, I need a good laugh because my life is stressful and it’s summer!

The audio version is 16 hours. But hear me out, it’s because she doesn’t read—she mostly just talks (it was like a non-stop standup)—which is absolutely delightful!

Leslie laughed and cried her way through the book but had me cracking up like a crazy person when I was driving or walking Rigs.

Leslie is not only hilarious, she’s authentic. Her voice comes from a life of busting her ass to make a living (she worked at Rosco’s Chicken and Waffles and at one point, feared being homeless), the pain of losing loved ones, working hard in the industry, finding her place as a comic, being kinder to herself, and learning to navigate her way through Hollywood as a Black woman.

I appreciated her honesty about being in the industry. It’s rare to see that in a celebrity memoir, where a lot of things are probably left out or sugar-coated. Leslie expressed her frustration with being on SNL and feeling pigeonholed in the sketches they would put her in. She said she was tired of playing the angry Black woman.

There were parts of the memoir that felt Ted-talk-y, but she pulled it off without it feeling overly preachy. Her story felt humble, like she knew where she came from and how grateful she was for the many opportunities she had to become the celebrity she is today.

I’m now a huge Leslie f*cking Jones fan. Whenever I walk away from a memoir with that “I wish I was your friend” feeling, I know it was good. Plus I binged it in less than a week and found myself not listening at times so I could save it for later.

So if you’re about to embark on a road trip this summer or just want to unwind with some real talk from a hilarious comic, get this book. Be warned though, there’s a lot of cursing.

And don’t forget, grab the audio version! (I saw her on a YouTube interview and she said the written vs. audiobook are totally different.)

This was a recommendation to me from my bestie, Mariana. (Thank you for the rec!) It’s about Patric Gagne (short for Patricia), who realized from a young age that she was a sociopath. (Yes, she goes over how she learned this.)

So, like any good sociopath would do, she dove headfirst into some “me-search” and got her PhD in Clinical Psychology.

The story is fascinating because as a young child, she recalls wanting to scratch this itch to do “bad things,” like lock her classmates in the bathroom at school or break into neighbors’ homes and steal things. A pendant necklace, random knickknacks… she’d sneak out of her house at night and wander around the neighborhood or spy on people. When she got caught, she said she had no remorse but even as a child, knew it was appropriate to act as if she did.

As she got older and was in college, her favorite thing to do was break into cars and go for joy rides in the middle of the night.

But… being the memoir junkie that I am, I kept feeling like there were parts of the story that felt a little too buttoned up. Some parts felt unbelievable, like, I thought it wasn’t realistic that as a sixth grader, she could break down how she felt when she did something bad, and it led me to question whether a lot of the story was fabricated. Or maybe her background as a PhD got in the way.

I had to Google it. I found Reddit threads with readers who were convinced her story was fabricated—and “who has such a perfect memory like that anyway?” (Here’s a great Substack read on whether Sociopath is a hoax or not.)

After going through what the Reddit naysayers had to say, I continued listening to the book as if it were a blend of fiction and nonfiction. Either way, it’s a fascinating read, and I highly recommend it.

I’d love to know what you’re reading. Share it in the comments!