Trevor was one of my favorite talk show hosts. Now he’s my favorite.

I started watching Stephen Colbert during the election season in 2016 and soon started watching talk shows as a pastime.

Trevor Noah was one of the guys that I watched frequently. I remember many of my favorites: the Trump translator voice over skit, his ‘close session’ clean rap… I first knew about Tomi Lahren through watching his confrontation with her and I am just amazed at his talent and respect him for his composure, moral and skills.

It’s not hard to pick up pieces of his past through his shows, where he grew up in as a mixed kid with a black mother and white Swiss father in South Africa in the partite period, where he hosted shows in the UK before Jon Stuart discovered him and passed on Comedy Central to him. He loves black culture, and really speaks up for the community.

His humor is never solely mean, it’s either light-hearted or with some deeper concerns or social implications. So is his book.

He never promotes his book through the show, but I grew interests in it as time goes on. Bill Gates recommended this book personally. But I was still weary at first, wondering if I should buy a book about a young talk show host who seems to have a sucessful and short life story so far and who might just be selling out for his fame. I wonder if his book would yield me any insight at all – It sure did, so much beyond my imagination of what one’s story can do to another person.

Bookstore is one of my favorite chill places on campus. I started reading Born a Crime one day. His reading is very easy to follow, and soon I encountered his ‘shit’ story, with literally a whole page of description of the experience of pooping. But what’s more amazing is what follows, a story of the entire neighborhood praying because they thought his poop was some kind of demon. I am not giving enough credits for making this story sound disgusting and boring but the way Trevor Noah did it, you can’t help but laugh – and that’s what I did, suddenly bursting into laughter among people, can’t help but open my mouth for a while.

So I thought, his life sounds funny, and he’s a good writer, turning regular stories into comedy and it felt amazing to read.

But I was wrong, about his funny life. His life is so much more brutal than what I can imagine, of a successful talk show host, making a fame and fortune in his early 30s.

Everything he talks about has some deeper meaning: when he tells the story of his friend, who has a name Hitler and how they created a huge disaster performing at a Jewish school, he’s talking about the ignorance of him and his friends, of how a misunderstanding turns into anger and disrespect. When he talks about his middle school life, he’s just using his perspective to talk about racial devide, biases that surrounded him his entire childhood. When he talks about god and churches, he’s talking about a culture, where religion plays an important role in many of its developments.

But his life is no more than ordinary: he stole and was almost caught and sent to prison; he hanged out with gansters in the poor neighborhood, hackling as a career, buying and selling stolen goods and pirated CDs; he did not go to college after finishing high school; he was almost sent into prison… You start asking yourself, so what is it about Trevor that makes him who he is now?

He never tries to talk about how he climbed up the ladder. In fact, he never thought of his life that way, he was raised as a wild mixed kid as he was.

But what I admire the most is the fact that he didn’t hide away any of his ignominious past. He tells it at it was. He wrote his own stories without providing moral justification of whether something is right or wrong. Sometimes it’s harder to tell than that – sometimes it’s just the stigma, sometimes it’s many’s fault. He never said “it’s okay when I stole because …” or “I’m ashamed of my years of hackling”. He simply wrote the story of what he did, how he thought at the time.

He has courage, the courage to acknolwedge his complex past, and a righteous moral, that makes him who he is today, a talk show host from South Africa who cares about people around the world and hope for a better one.

I understood why he wrote a book, because real life is more than comedy, it has its complex hues and he wants to preserve it through writing.

His mother, is what I think motivated Trevor to be who he is and the reason for this book. As usual, he wrote it without glorifying anyone. His mother was the free and fierce mother when Trevor was young, but was also the person who suffered domestic violence, unable to break free after her second marriage. She was the person who prayed to god and almost got killed, and she was the person who prayed to god who was shot and survived. I listened to the audiobook when Trevor’s mom was shot in the head. I paused for a moment, couldn’t believe what happened.

As I finished the book, I couldn’t help with tears filling up in my eyes. Thank god she’s still alive! But again, Trevor tells a story with more than just the story. So is this one. The portrayal of his half-brother, who witnessed his loved one killing another of his loved one, his mother as strong mentally as before, and the bad guy getting away with a crime … Life has been brutal to him, growing up in a place where justice is subjective, and life jokes around with you in one way or another.

Thank you Trevor Noah, for telling us your stories. Thank you for being who you are.