I Am the New Black

A disarmingly honest and touching — and, of course, hilarious — memoir
Yes, this audiobook has a fair chance of getting you pregnant. But, while that may be one of Tracey Morgan’s stock phrases, his I Am the New Black is so searingly earnest at times, the narrator himself would probably offer to take care of you for the rest of your life if that actually happened.

Indeed, Mr. Morgan paints an extremely sober portrait of himself as a young man: the ghetto-trapped son of a Vietnam veteran who lost numerous friends to drugs and AIDS. When he ventures on to musings on subjects as varied as the extremely amicable dissolution of his 20-year marriage to his high school sweetheart, his new life with his girlfriend Taneisha, his break-out roles on Saturday Night Live and his Emmy nomination for 30 Rock, he returns to his patented formula of a steady barrage of outrageous one-liners.

Over the course of his alternately extremely dark and absurdly funny narration, Mr. Morgan takes pains to point out that the bedrocks of his life are family and his art, which, for him, are fused together at the core. Mr. Morgan seems, at this point in his life, to have finally found the ideal balance between the two. In fact, his life and career choices seem to rely on the following thought processes: “My [deceased] aunt is guiding me through this, I know it. And just having your comedy game on was a must — ‘cause if you made the girls laugh, they love you for life. […] You know, Taneisha don’t like it all the time, but hey, she lives with it, you know, because, I cheat on Taneisha all the time and the girl’s name is Comedy.”