Reading your own memoir aloud is a different job from writing one, and this audiobook hands that job to Issa Rae. The listing credits her in both positions across five hours and forty-nine minutes, with no second voice and no dramatization anywhere in the description. For a collection whose comedy depends on where a sentence stops, that single credit is the most consequential detail on the page. Everything else the listing tells you, including its star average, turns out to be less reliable than the byline.
The Five Star-Grades Add Up to Twenty-Four
Rae built this material first as a web series and then as a New York Times bestselling collection, and the essays keep the shape of short episodes rather than chapters in a life story. The description promises cybersexing in the early days of the Internet, deflected comments on weight gain, the perils of eating out alone, public displays of affection, and learning to accept natural hair. Those are discrete bits rather than a through-line, and the audio inherits that structure exactly. You can stop after any one of them without losing your place.
Five responses sit under the title and they agree far more than they differ. One writer met the YouTube series through a coworker and describes being hooked immediately, then predicting television would follow. Another calls the memoir honest, hilarious and deeply relatable, and singles out the workplace and friendship material. A third came to the book before ever watching the web series, which reverses the usual route into this author entirely. A fourth, posted from Canada, compresses the whole reaction into two lines about how open the writing gets.
What the column does not do is agree with the number above it. The page displays 4.6 from five votes, and that figure requires those five votes to total twenty-three points out of a possible twenty-five. Count the grades actually on display and you find four fives and a four, which comes to twenty-four. A point has gone missing somewhere between the responses you can read and the average printed over them, and nothing on the listing offers a way to reconcile the two figures.
Rae Wrote It, and Rae Delivers It Too
Simon & Schuster Audio published this in February 2015, and the description you read now has plainly been updated since, because it opens by calling Rae the creator of HBO's Insecure. The essays themselves are named for the web series that came first, and a response from March 2017 recommends the television series separately, as something to go and watch afterward. Expect the earlier career rather than the later one. Nothing in these five hours is a set report or a production diary.
Two of the five responses were filed from outside the United States, one from Canada and one from Germany, and the German entry is written in German from start to finish. Anyone using this column to decide should count three usable opinions rather than five. Five votes is a number a single reading group could produce on its own. That is a thin pool for a title carrying a New York Times bestseller line in its own description, and the thinness reflects how few people have voted, not how the writing landed.
Where the audio makes its case is register. The book is written in the first person and pitched as self-deprecating, and the description quotes the opening move directly: the author is awkward and black, and someone once told her those were the two worst things anyone could be. A line like that depends entirely on how it is delivered, and here the person who wrote it is the person delivering it. No listener has to guess where the joke sits. That is the argument for choosing this format, and it is a real one.
Scraping Damage Fuses Words Together Mid-Sentence
Scraping has damaged this column in ways you will notice within seconds. One response breaks off mid-sentence while recommending the television series. Another has its words fused together where the line breaks were stripped out, so an exchange between friends about a title arrives as an unbroken run of letters. A third stops in the middle of a thought about unsolicited comments. None of that is the reviewers' doing and none of it can be repaired by reading more carefully, so take the column for tone and ignore its edges.
Nobody in those five responses says a word about the recording itself. That silence is unremarkable on most listings and genuinely awkward on this one, because the whole reason to choose audio here is that the comic voice belongs to the writer. You will be judging the delivery with no second opinion available on this listing at all. The credit tells you who is speaking; it cannot tell you whether five hours and forty-nine minutes of that voice suits your ear. The only way to find out is to start it.
Cultural and Regional is the single tag attached here, under biographies and memoirs. Accurate, and thin. The essays spend as much time on office politics, dating and early internet behavior as on identity, and somebody filtering by that tag alone would never surface the workplace material one of them singles out. The description does a better job than the taxonomy. Worth remembering if you arrived on this page through a category listing rather than through a search for the author by name.
The Listing Part Nobody Has Tested for You
Listeners who know Rae from television and want the earlier, scrappier version of the same sensibility will get exactly that, delivered by her, in sessions short enough to fit around anything else. Essay collections reward broken listening, and this one is built in pieces that end cleanly. The self-narration is the specific reason to pick the audio over the print edition rather than a bonus laid on top of it, and at under six hours the commitment stays small.
Someone hoping for a structured memoir with a narrative arc should adjust that expectation or move on, because these are essays and they behave like essays throughout. The average and the visible grades disagree by a point, only three of the responses are readable in English, and not one person has commented on the reading. Rae's own voice is the reason to pick this up, and it is also the one part of the listing nobody else has tested for you.
In Brief
- Performance: Issa Rae reads her own essays across five hours and forty-nine minutes, a solo credit with no second voice listed.
- What it covers: Introversion, race and workplace awkwardness, early internet culture, self-acceptance.
- Feel: Wry, episodic, conversational.
- Our call: The self-narration justifies choosing audio here, though the star math on the page does not survive a count.
Common Questions
How long is the Awkward Black Girl audiobook, and who reads it?
Five hours and forty-nine minutes, read by Issa Rae. Simon & Schuster Audio released it in February 2015 as a single-voice recording with no dramatization mentioned. The essays run short, so that runtime divides into small sittings rather than demanding one long stretch of uninterrupted attention.
What does the audiobook add that the printed collection does not?
The writer's own delivery. Comic essays built on self-deprecation live or die on where a line lands, and here the author controls that instead of a hired reader. Print gives you the same jokes with the timing left entirely to you, which is a genuine difference rather than a marketing one.
