Cack-Handed: A Memoir

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First is her mother, who takes the stereotypical strict African parent to extremes: her overprotective nature slipping into cruelty when she wouldn’t let young Gina hang out with friends. A collection of eccentric, addictive, and uproarious stories that combine family, race, gender, class, and country, Cack-Handed reveals how Gina’s unconventional upbringing became the foundation of her successful career as an international comedian.

One last tiny little niggle though, I dislike being referred to as "ignorant" or having lived under a "Jupiter sized rock" because I've not seen Black Panther (I've not seen any of the Marvel universe films).

Congratulations on your well deserved success and I wish you nothing but more success going forward. As well as her personal story, she interweaves information on race in the UK, giving a really good exposition of the reasons for the conflict between people of Caribbean and African origin: when she was a child in the 80s, Africans having been fed a diet of American culture thought that Caribbean and African American people were lazy and criminal, whereas British people of Caribbean origin didn’t realise they were originally African (there’s a big section on how the UK offshored its slave-owning to third countries); this division has started to clear with further generations, as other books I’ve read recently have clarified. Her Nigerian born mother ruled with an iron fist and as a culture, Africans, like many others, in general aren’t particularly accepting of the rainbow of sexuality and I wanted to see how that turned out with her mom. She has lead a very interesting life that's for sure but this memoir felt very much like book 1 and I'm not sure we are getting book 2. I knew very little about Gina Yashere beforehand but after reading this I'd want to be a fan of hers even if I weren't familiar with her professional work.

She had made her home in London and was determined to make the most of the opportunities available for herself and her three children, Gina and her two boys, Dele and Sheyi. A memoir written as a selection of short chapters connected to her mother's sayings, which is a clever structure. I like Yashere’s observational comedy and have seen her on various panel shows before she went off to America, so I was pleased to spot her autobiography on NetGalley – presumably to tie in with a paperback as it was published in 2021. We also learn that she turned to comedy as a way to mitigate some of the racialized violence she experienced and how writing this book helped her understand her mother and her history in a brand-new way.Not believing her life was difficult enough, she later left engineering to become a stand up comic, appearing on numerous television shows and becoming one of the top comedians in the UK, before giving it all up to move to the US, a dream she'd had since she was six years old, watching American kids on television, riding cool bicycles, and solving crimes. The memoir is about the history of the author's life and what it was like growing up as the daughter of two Nigerian immigrants in the U.

After coming to comedy in the mid-1990s she encountered a different racism, feeling herself the victim of a ‘one on, one out’ mentality that restricted the best of the already limited opportunities to only one famous black comic at a time… and Lenny Henry had that sewn up.Yashere has a really funny bit that she does about her Nigerian heritage including how she struggled for acceptance when she pursued being a comedian instead of the doctor/engineer career her mother had chosen for her. Perhaps they prefer that it’s not in adult film or crime, but fame has a way of pacifying even what are considered the most "shameful" acts or professions.