Born a Crime

Born a Crime is Trevor Noah's 2016 memoir, the New York Times bestseller and the canonical contemporary South African memoir of the late-apartheid-into-post-apartheid transition. The structural premise (and the title) is that the Immorality Act of 1927 made Noah's very existence illegal — the act criminalized sexual relationships between white and Black South Africans, and Noah's mother Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah, a Xhosa woman, and his father Robert, a Swiss-German man, conceived him in defiance of the law. Noah was born in 1984. The memoir runs his Soweto childhood, the daily logistical reality of being raised by his mother in the Black townships while looking visibly mixed-race in a country whose entire infrastructure was organized around the suppression of racial mixing, the chess-master-level survival strategies his mother taught him, and his eventual stand-up-comedy career.

Noah's structural method is the patient interleaving of the comic-memoir register with the contemporary popular-historical material his story actually requires. The opening chapter (the actual day Patricia Noah threw Trevor out of a moving minibus to save his life from a kidnapping) is one of the strongest contemporary American memoir openings in recent memory. The chapters about Noah's teenage CD-pirating-and-DJ business in Alexandra township are the funniest contemporary memoir material since David Sedaris's Me Talk Pretty One Day. The Patricia chapters across the entire memoir carry the structural emotional weight; the closing chapter on Patricia's near-fatal shooting by Noah's stepfather Ngisaveni Abel Shingange is some of the most carefully written contemporary American memoir prose about a specific kind of mother-and-son survival relationship.

Recommended as required contemporary memoir reading, as the right Noah entry point, and as the canonical contemporary South African memoir in English. Compare to Crying in H Mart (Michelle Zauner), Educated (Tara Westover), and Solito (Javier Zamora) on the broader contemporary memoir-of-difficult-childhood shelf. The Trevor Noah audiobook is the definitive audio production and the right format for first reading. Five stars without reservation.