Living My Best Life, Hun: Following Your Dreams Is No Joke

By dedicating this memoir to her 14-year-old self, British comedian Hughes immediately suggests that she’s written the story she needed to hear as an adolescent. This book will also likely resonate with others navigating the complexities of life, especially as intersectionality multiplies barriers and minimizes individuals’ sense of belonging. There’s humor, resiliency, tears, and much more, all written in the powerful voice that readers will recognize from Hughes’s BBC comedies and 2020 Netflix special. She’s structured her narrative in some ways like a stand-up routine, but there’s also an interwoven powerful literary rhetoric and a style that captures a conversational tone while drawing attention to bigger sociocultural issues. After she describes writing herself into comedies, readers may never watch reruns of Frasier or the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air without imagining how much better the shows would be with Hughes in them.