The Last Black Unicorn

Tiffany Haddish's memoir traces her path from a childhood marked by poverty, abuse, and foster care in South Central Los Angeles to her breakthrough as a comedian and actress. The book moves through her life roughly chronologically, blending painful revelations with comic storytelling.

Haddish opens with her difficult early years. In elementary and middle school, classmates teased her for the moles on her face, her onion-scented clothes, and her unkempt hair. The cruelest nickname, "Dirty Ass Unicorn," came from a spiky wart on her forehead that resembled a horn. Her grandmother eventually had the wart burned off by a doctor, an event Haddish frames as the symbolic origin of her identity as the "Last Black Unicorn."

High school at El Camino Real, a predominantly white, Hispanic, and Asian school in the San Fernando Valley, proved far better. Bused from South Central, Haddish found that her outspokenness made her popular. She was functionally illiterate through ninth grade, faking her way through advanced-placement courses using her exceptional memory and social skills. Her drama teacher, Miss Gree, discovered the truth, kept it confidential, and tutored Haddish to a ninth-grade reading level within a month. Haddish then won first place at a Shakespeare Festival. She became the school mascot and grew so popular that game attendance dropped when she briefly quit. A professional DJ recruited her as a hype woman at Bar Mitzvahs, Jewish coming-of-age celebrations, launching a decade-long career performing at over 500 events.

Haddish provides extensive background on her family's collapse. When Haddish was eight, she volunteered to babysit her younger siblings; her mother left and did not return for two days. Her stepfather, whom Haddish calls "Step-Father," knew about a car accident on the freeway but told no one. Her mother suffered a severe brain injury, forgot all her children except Haddish, and had to relearn walking, talking, and eating. At eight years old, Haddish reversed their roles, teaching her mother basic skills. After the accident, her mother became verbally and physically abusive, telling Haddish she was ugly and stupid because she resembled her biological father. On Haddish's twenty-first birthday, Step-Father claimed he had cut the brake line on her mother's car to kill the entire family for insurance money; he said only Haddish's offer to babysit had kept the children out of the vehicle. He later denied the confession, and police told Haddish the claim could never be proven.

At thirteen, Haddish entered foster care after her mother, whose mental health condition had worsened, struck a neighbor's baby during a fight. Her mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia and hospitalized for a year. Step-Father refused to take the children. Haddish cycled through group homes and a foster home where an elderly man in the household molested her. She did not recognize the abuse until a friend identified it when she was nineteen. Her grandmother eventually gained custody but kept the children in the system for financial support. At eighteen, once payments stopped, her grandmother put her out, and Haddish became homeless.

At fifteen, a social worker offered Haddish a choice between psychiatric therapy and the Laugh Factory Comedy Camp. She chose comedy. There, visiting comedian Richard Pryor gave her career-defining advice: Audiences come to have fun, so the performer must be having fun onstage. Because she was a foster child and technically a ward of the state, Haddish needed a judge's permission to appear on a television news segment about the camp. She rode buses to a courthouse, told the judge she would become a world-famous comedian, and secured the paperwork. The Laugh Factory began letting her perform short sets, but at eighteen, homeless and needing income, she had to quit.

Haddish's romantic life forms a major thread. She met Titus, a baggage handler, in 2001. The relationship deteriorated when he began aspiring to pimp women and cheated with a woman named Bertha. After discovering she was pregnant, Haddish chose an abortion, describing the decision as an act of responsibility given Titus's unemployment. She then found a hidden videotape showing Titus coaching Bertha in sexual techniques, time-stamped on Haddish's birthday. She ended the relationship with elaborate revenge, including distributing bootleg copies of Charlie's Angels spliced with his sex tape to his entire family at Christmas. Afterward, she befriended Bertha to turn her against Titus, began booking Bertha's pornography gigs for a 10 percent cut, and humiliated Titus in front of his pimp friends before exiting the business as unprofitable.

At twenty-two, emotional turmoil manifested as severe physical illness. A therapist who kept laughing at Haddish's stories suggested she return to comedy. Her first paid gig, at a lesbian event, ended in disaster when the audience heckled her for material about men. But receiving payment despite bombing crystallized her commitment: The stage was the one place she felt safe and heard.

The book's most difficult section concerns her ex-husband, a police officer she first met on the cruise with Titus. Five years later, he tracked her down and offered to find her estranged Eritrean father in exchange for marriage. She overlooked his controlling behavior, including tracking devices on her car. The relationship turned violent: He choked her multiple times, slammed her into a hotel wall at the Just for Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal, and dragged her by the collar in front of other comedians. After the worst beating, triggered by a text from another woman on his phone, Haddish drove to a police station. Officers photographed her injuries and arrested him. At the hospital, she miscarried a pregnancy she had not known about. She filed for divorce but eventually remarried him after his son entered foster care, which triggered her own childhood trauma. The second marriage ended when she discovered he had been hiding an eleven-year-old daughter he had abandoned, secretly diverting money he claimed went toward rent to pay court-ordered child support. His willingness to abandon a child crossed her deepest personal boundary, and she divorced him permanently.

Haddish details her long road to success, including her disqualifying bomb during the Atlanta round of Who's Got Jokes?, a stand-up competition show hosted by Bill Bellamy, and being told by male comedians she could only tour with them if she had sex with them. She recounts living in her Geo Metro until comedian Kevin Hart, whom she calls her "comedy guardian angel," gave her $300 and helped her find an apartment. She briefly tried Scientology, a religious organization that offered free housing and a small stipend, but fled when dormitory bunk beds triggered memories of being beaten in group homes. During the filming of Girls Trip, she went on a swamp tour with her costar Jada Pinkett Smith and Jada's husband, Will Smith. Jada advised Haddish to hire an assistant to manage daily tasks.

Haddish identifies her appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show as the moment she knew she had arrived. As a child, she had idolized Arsenio, getting beaten for sneaking out of bed to watch his show. Those appearances led to filmmaker Tyler Perry casting her, then to The Carmichael Show and Girls Trip, which opened in July 2017 to $30 million and transformed her career. She closes by reflecting that her father died on May 13, 2017, and that her mother remains in a mental health facility. Her life goal is to earn enough to house her mother with a full-time nurse. She wants to adopt a foster child around eight or nine, the age at which she felt most abandoned. The stage, she writes, is the only place she has ever felt safe, accepted, and heard, and she frames her painful experiences as the raw material for bringing others joy.