The book ends with her making the finals of the NBC reality show Last Comic Standing, which opened more doors than an advent calendar. Mum also provides many of the funniest lines in the book: the often bonkers Nigerian proverbs that Yashere uses for chapter headings, which always contain a nugget of folk wisdom, amusingly phrased. The nepotism over here in the UK is real and sickening, if it's not an automatic free pass from Oxbridge then it's a parent who knows someone. An incident that highlights racist attitudes at the time really poignantly is the following: when Gina was 9 years old she happened to be leaning on a car when a grown man's voice was heard: 'Get the fuck off my car, you black bastard!

I appreciate how patiently Gina inserts littles lessons on West African culture and history throughout the book, knowing that Western schools and media often get the narrative wrong. She was always treated as a 'token' Black, and therefore had few hopes of moving up despite being very talented and popular among viewers.In the UK there are people who work in the entertainment business who are so below par, you have to look twice at the TV screen to just wonder how on earth are they still working and keep being endorsed. By this point, the reader has come to understand Yashere’s journey, thanks to the the variously entertaining, troubling, stories from her life, both professionally and personally, that she tells so engagingly and with more heart that comes through in her often hard-edged stand-up.

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. From what I’ve read, it does seem to be blurring now, especially as people of direct African heritage are outnumbering Caribbean heritage people in the UK now. But the violence, abuse, and cruelty that run throughout the first two thirds of the novel are far from amusing or entertaining.She’s also very clear on the institutional racism handed out by employers, the police and the British entertainment industry, coming over as fair and fairly angry and giving a lot of extra value to the book. Gina was brilliant back then as she is now and always stood out, and most importantly, she was FUNN-AYYY. Congratulations on your well deserved success and I wish you nothing but more success going forward. I've always found her comedy hilarious and the times when her mum has been in an audience have added to her stories.

Cack-handed' means left-handed but also, a Gina explains in the Foreword, clumsy and awkward, which, she says, she is. Behind every great comedienne there is a great deal of pain and this certainly made a lot of that pain public. Much of this will be familiar to anyone who knows Gina Yashere's work, she describes a difficult upbringing partly due to her mother's experience of being Nigerian in the UK and partly due to her abusive step-father, (she protests that she never thought of this as abuse though, it was just how it was).As a first generation black Brit with parents who emigrated to the UK in the 60's from one of the then colonies, but at least 10 years older than Gina, I was really interested in her story and journey. There were never any lulls in the book, usually there will be a section that is less interesting but Gina has a talent for drawing out the humour and engaging aspects of any topic.

According to family superstition, Gina Yashere was born to fulfil the dreams of her grandmother Patience. The decision to move to the US was a gamble because she would be starting from scratch but one that paid off. Throughout the book, Gina recounts her experiences as part of the "lost generation" of Nigerian children born abroad, her educational journey that took her to a career in engineering that then swerved into her flourishing comedy career, with hints about her coming out story along the way as well.I felt that her memoir could've been a bit more rounded, and would've loved to hear about when she chose to publicly come out; so much more could be been written on this issue, especially with her mother and the community she was raised in. In this entertaining and informative autobiography, Gina takes us honestly and openly through her formative years in London, with a formidable Nigerian mum and horrible stepfather, covering her childhood, education, work in engineering, burgeoning career and attempts to crack America and ending with her moving there with a two-year work visa. I’ve encountered quite a lot of information on the divisions between African and Caribbean-origin people in the UK recently but this one really set out theories as to why each set of people has this opinion of the other.