Zarna Garg- This American Woman is a one-in-a-billion

Zarna Garg- This American Woman is a one-in-a-billion

Wow. I thought this would be a typical Asian immigrant story of a hedge fund housewife who wants to do comedy because she’s bored.

Zarna is like me. A lawyer turned Tiger Mom who went to business school, and a loudmouth who somehow found love with a sweet guy and now wants to create comedy. And that’s where the similarity ends. While I stayed safe behind my writing, Zarna busted out of her repressive sari to do stand up! (Astonished gasps from Asian achievers).

She defied her wealthy father, ran away from home, escaped an arranged marriage, fled to the States, fast tracked through college and law school, and posted a no-nonsense mating ad:

  “To some, I am too short or too plump.
  Too dark or too argumentative.
  But enough about me.
  This is what I need from you:
  A husband and a partner,
  somebody who is ambitious but not ruthless,
  confident but not arrogant,
  and humble but not timid.
  Most of all, he is honest.
       x x x 

  Only contact me if you want to get married.
  (NO FRIENDS!)
  Kindly include your most recent tax returns and medical records.”

You laugh but she got hundreds of meets. And Zarna still found love. She now calls her hedge fund husband “the weakest link” in their family.

Now she’s a mom of three sweet but superior kids. “It is every Indian’s duty to populate the Earth, so it doesn’t really matter if you like your kid or not.”

Zarna’s memoir is written like an unbelievable Bollywood movie with the readability of a witty graphic novel. Her dialogues are tight and funny! There are no wasted words. Zarna was right to call Bob Iger because her life should be made into a movie.

Zarna’s lines are as brutal as they are beautiful. She calls her New York neighborhood “The Upper Beast Side”, her kids’ pricey school “the Four Seasons of high schools”, while “Bronx Science looks like a penitentiary.”

Ever the entertainer, Zarna packs her memoir with many great one-liners wrapped in her jaw-dropping point of view.

On coaches: “There is an entire kids’ travel sports industrial complex engineered by these hard-ass, no-life kids’ sports coaches, whom I gather are scraped from the bottom of some leaking Little League reject barrel, and who take out their entire failed life’s frustrations on one demographic in particular: the moms of the kids they coach.”

Zarna dares to bare her wounds. Though she jokes about her pain, we feel her well of anguish caused by her mom’s death, her dad’s distance, her beloved brother’s departure, her isolation in America, her financial upheaval, and the scorn she endured from her tech Indian friends every time her business failed—19 times! Her hunger to find her place in the world ate at her soul.

“It was my children who dared me to become a stand-up comedian. This is because only a child would think comedy is a job.”

Zarna wasn’t just in it for her ego. She was in beast survival mode after her husband lost his job. “I forced my confidence and poise to expand, if not for myself, then for the roof over my family’s head.”

“[B]eing desperate was the only thing that gave me the focus, the strength, and the energy to build the business of my wildest dreams.”

Zarna tackled her stand-up career with the focused tenacity of a tactical five-star general. She employed experts to help her craft her writing and hone her voice, she played in the barracks of the grimy comedy bars, she deployed her family on TikTok, and then wrote a playbook on how she did it all.

Zarna’s trajectory is supersonic. Her comedy screenplay won an award in 2019, she started stand up in 2020, bustled through COVID in 2021, went on tour with Tina Fey and Amy Poehler in 2023, had a special by 2024, then published a New York Times bestselling book in 2025. But she’s not done.

Zarna is still doing shows, relating with her fans, posting on TikTok, all while raising her kids and writing a second book. She’s unbelievable! Though, not that surprising for an Asian super achiever.

Zarna is inspiring. Artists, businesses, and desperate housewives will learn more from her than those overpaid mediocre CEOs. It takes incredible balls of steel to spurn a cushy, predictable life to pursue stand-up comedy, a career that has more failures than laughs.

This is an amazing memoir. Unforgettable and searing. It’s Zarna slapping you in the face and telling you: You think life is hard? This is what hard is!

In Zarna’s case, it wasn’t enough to just succeed. She had to break tradition and subvert troll’s expectations. There is no one like Zarna. And now all Tiger Moms will point to her as the new standard of what an Asian immigrant mom can achieve in America.

— Ivy Lopez @IvyDigest

Ivy is a Jesuit-educated lawyer turned columnist and book reviewer. For the latest Silicon Valley books follow @Ivy Digest on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.