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Loni Love Keeps It Real in Her New Book
The memoir traces her trajectory from Detroit projects to multi-hyphenate comedian
Loni Love, the Emmy-award-winning co-host of The Real, has come a long way from her humble beginnings.
She was kicked out of her mother’s home in a Detroit housing project and lived in her car while working on an assembly line at General Motors. It wasn’t until college that she started dabbling in comedy, and though she took an engineering job in California, she moonlit as a standup comedian, eventually becoming a regular at the Laugh Factory in L.A. and then a finalist on Star Search in 2003. “I took some time to think about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life,” she recalls. “At my job, my manager had a massive heart attack. It made me realize that nothing is certain, nothing is for sure, and if I’m going to make a move, I gotta make a move now.”
After working as a road comic for years, gigging across the country, she has been a co-host of The Real, speaking her own truth, with valuable insight, advice, and support, since 2014. She also co-hosts a podcast, Café Mocha, with rapper YoYo, which she calls the only nationally syndicated show of its kind that was created exclusively by and for women of color. It can be found on over 40 stations, including SiriusXM.
Now, the comedian is telling us how she became a star in her new memoir, I Tried to Change So You Don’t Have To: True Life Lessons, out June 23 with Hachette publishers. It follows her humble upbringing in Detroit, bad boyfriends (and their mothers), office jobs, comedy breaks, and mistakes. As she sums up the book: “It’s a comedy memoir that tells the story about being homeless, married, how I went from being A to B, being an Emmy Award winner — it’s juicy.”
“Because women of color don’t have a lot of stories out there, we have to write our stories, or someone else will tell your story.”
It details how she lost a childhood friend to gun violence and the time she got arrested in college by a White police officer for “trespassing” at a restaurant (after defending a friend who filled up a free cup of water with soda). It also details the…
