I'm the One That I Want - Hardcover

Cho, Margaret

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0345440137 ISBN 13: 9780345440136

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 2001

Synopsis

Comedian. Icon. TV star. Hollywood casualty. Role model. Trash talker. Fag hag. Gypsy. Tramp. Thief. Margaret Cho is the only living human being to be all these things without having multiple personality disorder and she displays them all in this funny, fierce, and honest memoir.

At age sixteen Margaret dropped out of school and began touring as a standup comedian. By twenty-three she was the star of her own sitcom, "All-American Girl", the groundbreaking show featuring television’s first Asian American family. But the road to fame wasn’t smooth, and when the sitcom crashed and burned, so did Margaret.

Without ever losing her trademark humor, Margaret tells her astonishing tale of dieting her way into the hospital, drinking her way into oblivion, then rising from the ashes in her smash-hit one-woman show and record-breaking concert film.

As one of the country’s most visible Asian Americans, she has a unique perspective on identity and acceptance. As one of the country’s funniest and most quoted personalities, she takes no prisoners. And as a warm and wise woman who has seen the highs and lows of life, she has words of encouragement for anyone who has ever felt like an outsider.

I’m the One That I Want is filled with dead-on insights about the experience of being a woman with attitude. In her own wicked style, Margaret Cho has written a book every bit as funny, shocking, and irreverent as she is.

About this title

Review

Don't come to this bitter, engrossing memoir for a quick and easy laugh. The material that Margaret Cho has turned to such riotous ends in her stand-up act has a very different flavor on the page. An unpopular child (okay, hated and reviled), Cho made friends with the drag queens who worked in her father's bookstore, soon becoming a fag hag, and finding this mutual attraction "both nurturing and powerful, sweet and sour, retail and wholesale." "Drag queens are strong because they have so much to fight against," writes Cho, "homophobia, sexism, pink eye." To support herself at the beginning of her comedy career, Cho worked at FAO Schwarz, sometimes moonlighting in phone sex. Occasionally the jobs would overlap, and she would find herself doing phone sex dressed as Raggedy Ann. There isn't much here about Cho's early success, but she does delve at length into her disastrous sitcom, and devotes many pages to her battles with her weight, with drugs, and with alcohol, and her hopeless relationships with men (none of the bisexual material from her stage act is included here). Cho's message is about self-esteem in the face of consistent opposition from her family, the network that aired a "Margaret Cho" sitcom but permitted her no creative control, and a society that rewards women for thinness, whiteness, meekness, and a shut mouth. --Regina Marler

From the Back Cover

“[A] beautiful book . . . It is innately empowering, honest, and raw.”
–ROSIE O’DONNELL
“REAL AND REVEALING . . . What makes Cho’s book resonate is the razor-sharp honesty she deploys and the straight-ahead style she uses to chronicle her messed-up life. Her humor is in no short supply.”
–Los Angeles Times Book Review

“A COMPELLING, QUICK READ THAT WILL SATISFY CHO’S FANS AND INSTANTLY MAKE NEW ONES.”
–The New Orleans Times-Picayune

Edition details

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0345440137
• ISBN 13: 9780345440136
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224