I Can't Make This Up: Life Lessons

Kevin Hart's memoir, written with Neil Strauss. He grew up in North Philadelphia with a mother who held everything together and a father who was in and out of jail and addiction, went into stand-up because he was funny and short and there was nothing else, and bombed for years in front of rooms that had no interest in him.

He tells it as a sequence of lessons, each drawn from something that went badly, and he is as willing to be the fool of the story as anyone else in it.