If you don’t know who Leslie Jones is, “Where have you been, son?” (in my Leslie Jones voice). The word “undeniable” appears quite often throughout the book. It’s a fitting word to describe the life of a comic whose career didn’t take off until she was 47 years old.
This year’s memoirs have kept us well-fed, for sure. Jones’ memoir, Leslie F*cking Jones, is no exception. Annette Leslie Jones dropped her first name because she never liked it. Her rise to fame has not been easy, and she, like most of us, admits to making mistakes along the way.
Let me just say that Jones’ memoir is emotional, sad, forthcoming, laugh-out-loud funny, and relatable. It’s especially worthwhile to also listen to the audio version. She references the content from the book, but she doesn’t read it verbatim. She just freestyles and gives it to us straight like only she can. She shares so much emotion. She laughs, she cries, and she rants. It is such an experience. It felt like you were sitting around listening to her podcast, rather than listening to an audiobook.
This memoir has many moments of tenderness and humor. I admire the way Jones stands up for herself as a Black woman who is loud, dark-skinned, tall, and unapologetically confident.
Throughout her life, Jones had to overcome so much, and her success is a testament to not putting a timeframe on your success. She’s definitely had a journey from her childhood in Memphis, Tennessee, to her early stand-up days, to the craziest behind-the-scenes antics on Ghostbusters, Supermarket Sweep, and The Daily Show. The cover of the book features a childhood photo of Jones flashing a wide grin at the camera and holding a wired microphone, foretelling her future career.
Jones is funny, but she is also raw. Navigating through her story, you see how vulnerable she is. Despite this vulnerability, she does not look for sympathy or consider herself a victim but instead speaks about the child abuse, racism, and sexism she endured at an early age. “The psychology of what I was doing is clear,” she writes. “When your power is taken away, you need to reassert it somehow, and what better way than dominating something less powerful than you? I found something more innocent than me and took my agony out on it, and I was trying to regain control because it had been taken away from me.”
The rage she built up that could have shifted her to a foul life was stopped by her mother introducing her to sports. What I found to be relatable here is that we often don’t understand our parents until we are adults. It took Jones years to understand this and other choices her mother made. She emphasizes loving and honoring our parents while they are alive — taking the time to understand how they came to be the way they are and maybe becoming less critical of them.
Jones is six feet tall and learned how to deal with bullies. She moved a lot as a child due to her father being in the army. She watched her father turn into an alcoholic and witnessed her strong mother becoming sick. Jones became a basketball star, found toxic love, became rebellious, experienced rejection in many different ways, was extremely broke, became extremely wealthy, had numerous jobs, had plenty of fights, got booed off stage, and faced the worst deaths of people close to her. Through it all: she is Leslie.
“You are Black; you are female,” Jones’ father once said. “But if you work harder and you’re better than everybody else, they can’t f*cking deny you.”
Jones is open about her relationships, family life, being an athlete in high school and college, her comedy inspirations (some were a very pleasant surprise), and her early career.
One particular relationship story was when she was just 18 years old. She became pregnant multiple times during her on-again, off-again relationship with a man named Richard Brooks. The first time she had an abortion was when she was 18 and Brooks was 27.
She noted that the relationship lasted “too many years” and they never used birth control. By her mid-20s, Jones had undergone three abortions when she came to the realization that abortion “is not a birth control method.”
“My mom got sick early in my life and she wasn’t there to teach me about sex education,” Jones wrote, noting that her mother suffered a massive stroke when she was young. Jones wished she had been taught properly about pregnancy prevention and admitted she just “didn’t know any of that stuff.”
Jones goes through a lot to discover who she is, and in the process, she finds ways to make people laugh and uplift them in the process. She is unapologetically herself, and emphasizes the importance of loving people while they are alive and being in their presence. She cries a lot, feels a lot, and has found her beauty, but that did not happen overnight.
I applaud her because I feel like this is truly how a lot of us feel or have felt. I found myself laughing out loud at the many encounters she has had. It is her unwavering determination, though, that has kept her moving forward and makes the memoir so compelling.
I knew that Jones started out on Saturday Night Live as a writer before becoming a cast member. This marked the first time in the show’s history that the cast included more than one Black woman; also, the 40th season was the first to have five concurrent Black cast members, beating the previous record of three. Her time at SNL was historic, but it was in such a small portion of the book. I assume it’s intentional but I still expected her to talk about this more. I was a little disappointed there.
If you’ve seen any of her stand-up performances, you know Jones is a hilarious force of nature; she keeps it real and delivers with perfection. What I really love about her is that she’s totally transparent. She is who she is. With her, audiences need to either get on board for the wild ride or get out of the way. That’s what I enjoy about her, and this memoir embodies all those traits. This memoir gets 5/5 stars from me.
Leslie F*cking Jones is available now wherever books are sold.
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