- She played Ross's paleontologist love interest on Friends. She was the recurring character, Charlie Wheeler.
- She hosted Talk Soup, a show that aired on E! in the 90's. She'd play clips from talk shows and make jokes.
- She's the voice of Lana Kane on the wickedly hilarious animated comedy, Archer, on FX. Kane is an international spy who can shoot a semi-automatic weapon in her lingerie while rolling her eyes at partner Sterling Archer's antics. (YUP.)
- She waxes poetic about the day's news and gossip on The Talk with a handful of co-hosts (including Ozzy Osbourne's wife Sharon and Sara Gilbert, the angsty brunette from Roseanne who's all grown-up now).
- And she hosts a podcast, Girl on Guy. She interviews chefs, actors, comedians, and athletes to find out how they made it. And in each episode she has them share one of the most humiliating moments on their path to success. She calls them "self-inflicted wound stories."
And that leads us straight to her new book. Tyler says it wasn't fair to make her podcast guests talk about their embarrassing failures without sharing some of her own.In Self-Inflicted Wounds, Tyler lets you know early and often that she was big for her age. "I was the giant black girl," she says. "I mean I stood out for a variety of reasons: Because I was tall, because I was weird and because I was black."Tyler grew up in Oakland and San Francisco, Calif., raised by vegetarian parents who believed in meditation but not television. Her family was poor, says Tyler. (And, I know you're probably running through all the Bay Area stereotypes and thinking, well that's not THAT strange. Sorry, not all Bay kids are running around meditating and eating tofu sandwiches. It's weird. Maybe not as weird as it would be in Boone County, Mo., but it's not how most kids are raised.)So she writes about being that weird kid, and how her weird-kid mishaps were made worse by her size — and her total lack of fear.She relates tales of her own self-inflicted wounds: nearly cutting herself in half playing on an abandoned hobby horse at age five, setting the house on fire while making french fries at seven, numerous failed attempts to trade veggie lunches for bologna sammy's at school, and ruining her chances with the high school crush. "Drinking too much and getting hung over and vomiting all over him and myself and his car," she says. "That was not a good look, at all."The book may sound depressing but it's funny. And, for me, the footnotes provided those laugh-out-loud moments that make people next to you on an airplane turn and look at you like you're nuts. And speaking of nuts, here's one of my favorite footnotes from Self-inflicted Wounds.Aisha Tyler's humor is dirty and really nerdy all at the same time. It's hard to explain because she's hard to explain. She writes about being a black whitewater rafting guide for underprivileged deaf teens in high school, singing in an all-girls a cappella group in college, and her grown-up "penchant for maudlin Korean pop." Listen to her read from a passage about how Koreans are "out-blacking" black folks these days.And when she decided not to utilize her Ivy League degree in poli-sci and environmental studies from Dartmouth and become a comedian, she says she stood out all over again. This time as the 6-foot-tall black woman who didn't fit the Def Comedy Jam mold."God, I mean I had so many people tell me, what you're doing doesn't work," says Tyler. "I used to have to get on stage and apologize for talking the way that I speak. I think people assume that because I talk the way that I talk that I grew up with money and then I've had to say, 'No, I grew up poor.' And then I was like, 'Why do I have to play this game where the only black experience that's authentic is the one where you grew up in poverty?' I mean, it's ridiculous."Tyler says she wanted Self-Inflicted Wounds to be funny, but she wanted people to get something out of it besides laughs."I felt like if I was going to have people sit down and give me a week of their life, it shouldn't be a waste of their time." The take-away is to be your authentic self, follow your dreams, and don't let failure and humiliation hold you back. Tyler tells 33 stories of her own humiliations and failures as proof that you can and will survive, and says she has enough left over to write another book.Until then, here's the first chapter of Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heart warming Tales of Epic Humiliation.
I was about 12 when I first encountered The Moonstone — or a Classics Illustrated version of it — digging through an old trunk in my grandfather's house on a rainy Bengali afternoon. I loved the Classics Illustrated series (the graphic novels of my youth that simplified famous novels for children), presenting us with swashbuckling plotlines, and heroes and villains that were unmistakably, unashamedly, what they were supposed to be.
The Moonstone was all I could have hoped for. A mysterious, cursed jewel, wrested from India, only to be stolen later from a great British mansion. Enigmatic, dangerous priests who follow it across the ocean in hopes of wresting it back. A young, beautiful, rich and courageous heroine (who in my mind looked very like me). Deaths. Disappearances. Romance. Bungling policemen. A smart butler. And enough twists and turns to keep a reader on tenterhooks until a highly satisfying ending is delivered. I devoured it in a day, and thought back on it with pleasure over the years.
So when I came across a copy of The Moonstone recently in a used bookstore, I picked it up at once — but surreptitiously. As a student of post-colonialism, I knew Wilkie Collins' portrayal of an exotic India (temples, turbaned priests, curses, magical jewels) was suspect. As a teacher of creative writing, I was dismissive of books that hinged upon plot. As a reader I was afraid that I would be disappointed this time around, that the magician's amazing powers might turn out to be a scarf hidden in a sleeve. And I knew the punch line — the criminal's identity — already.
But I was surprised and delighted to discover a whole new set of pleasures in The Moonstone. As a writer, I was struck by how masterfully Collins pulls together the different strands of a complicated plot. T.S. Eliot called The Moonstone "the first, the longest, and the best of the modern English detective novel." I could see why. Reading the book was a little like seeing the Wright brothers maneuvering their first aircraft, except there was no awkward bucking, no crashes.
Many conventions of the detective novel that we take for granted — a mysterious crime that is systematically unraveled through a process of inquiry, a detective with unusual powers of analysis, the surprise when the criminal turns out to be someone unexpected — are being used by Collins for the first time.
The plot with its hairpin twists held my interest and invited me to happily suspend disbelief, but it did not overwhelm the characters. The heroine, Rachel Verinder, complicated and stubborn, is unlike the "legless angels" popular in Victorian literature. The dilemmas she faces remain significant today: Should we marry where our passions lead us, or choose a life partner whose values are compatible with ours? If the person we love turns out to be a criminal, should we turn him in or allow someone else to be blamed?
And Collins' portrayal of India is much more nuanced than I had credited him with. It is an Englishman who turns out to be the real villain of The Moonstone. By contrast, the three Indian priests who dedicate their lives to returning the jewel to its proper home in the temple, though they have nothing personal to gain by doing so, are positively heroic. A frisson of vindicated delight went through me as I came across this rare depiction of Indian moral superiority in a Victorian novel — and that was my ultimate guilty pleasure.
My Guilty Pleasure is produced and edited by the team at NPR Books.
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