Talk show rebel Ziwe on her new essay collection ‘Black Friend’

On Ziwe’s eponymous late-night talk show, which Showtime tragically canceled earlier this year, everything was carefully curated: the cartoonish graphics, the confrontational style, the contrast of the gaudy pink set with Ziwe Fubudoh’s knack for leaping into cringe and controversy with questions like: How many Black friends do you have?

But in her first book of essays, “Black Friend,” out this week, the writer-comedian plays Bad Cop with herself on topics ranging from her Nigerian immigrant upbringing to the impact of fame on body image, and the result feels unrehearsed. Though her terse acknowledgments section (in its entirety: “Thank you”) feels very Ziwe, an essay titled “Wikifeet” veers from jokes about foot fetishists to memories of growing up “an ugly duckling.” Throughout, Ziwe toggles between sincerity and absurdity, personal anecdotes and ample footnotes, in search of a subject much harder to pin down than dumbfounded Chet Hanks or blasé Julia Fox.

“It’s not in my impulse to share things with strangers,” she told The Times during a Zoom interview from New York earlier this month. “The editing process for me was excavating where I personally stood and what my perspective was.”

The title of her book is a nod to the viral Instagram Live interviews that inspired her talk show, in which her “Black friends” question played on the clichéd defense of white people called out for racism. But it’s also a reclamation of her own centrality in the narrative, as she tells the story of how she went from sidekick to star.

Our conversation — about her foray into books, how she differs from her persona and what it means to be a “Black friend” — has been edited for clarity and length.

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