This book that is part memoir/part advice guide begins with its narrator and protagonist, entertainer Issa Rae, confessing to being a “cyber ho” at age eleven. She explains that with the arrival of America Online, everything about being a computer geek changed for her overnight. Almost instantly, she began “catfishing” long before the term was ever invented. AOL provides her with a means of making contact with strangers—almost all of them sexually predatory males—under the guise of a “role” she could play out. That she learned very quickly the unwritten rules about how to respond to the inevitable question of “what are you wearing” is an indication of the level of discourse at which these early online relationships developed.
While there is certainly a quality of ickiness in her opening confessional, the purpose is not lascivious. She is establishing from the onset a motif which will recur throughout the book as the narrative of her maturity coincides with the maturing of the internet into the social media behemoth it is today. The story of how Jo-Issa Rae Diop became Issa Rae is inextricably linked to the rise of the internet and its myriad revolutions and permutations. Within this slight volume, the leap from dial-up internet requiring modems and use that meant nobody in the house could use the telephone to her producing her own successful YouTube series is rapid and almost predictable.
What is far less predictable are those segments of the book that detail what was going on personally during that same period. What had always appeared to the children to be a perfectly happy marriage was an illusion which exploded during Issa’s junior year in high school. The announcement of divorce instantly stimulates daddy’s girl to put the blame on mom. That the man who called her his “favorite girl” in a family with only one daughter could possibly be to blame for the marriage collapsing was inconceivable. Which makes it all the more emotionally painful when she shows up at her dad’s single guy apartment like she always has one night only to be see a strange woman there who compounds the shock by acting strangely. It is her mother who finally tells her the truth: that her father had been unfaithful long before the divorce and he was the reason the marriage failed. Relations between father and daughter undergo a long period tension and conflict which impacts her decisions on how best to pursue her education. Ultimately, her father’s new house in Ladera Heights serves double duty as the location for shooting her web series Fly Guys Present “The F Word” and this situation makes avoiding the issue impossible.
Along the way to reconciling the estrangement with her father, Issa deals with eating disorders, gaining and losing her black militancy, daily battling with the various issues related to “black hair issues” and learning and mastering the art of using social media for self-promotion which eventually lead to producing two different web-only series that in turn result in signing big time contracts with media behemoths whose least-watched shows dwarf the most viewed episode of either of her series.
Interspersed with the directly autobiographical narrative in the book are five different sections which fall under the umbrella title “ABG Guide” (for Awkward Black Girl, obviously.) These are guides to Public Grazing, The Hair Advantage, Black Women & Asian Men, and When Co-Workers Attack. Although informed by personal experience, these sections of the book are more reader-directed than the rest of the book as they exist for the purpose of the author sharing what she has learned over the course of a life filled with awkward moments that she has chosen to transform into life lessons to be proud of rather than embarrassed by.
