Tamara Yajia’s life isn’t a television show – yet.
Yajia’s memoir Cry for Me, Argentina: My Life as a Failed Child Star makes a compelling argument for a silver screen taping. As the comedy writer tells it, her young life was an inescapable rollercoaster of immigration from Argentina to the United States and back again, alongside a cast of overbearing, potty-talk-loving relatives and dysfunctionally supportive friends.
Throughout the chaos, dreams of stardom gave Yajia purpose. She performed for rabbis, conference groups, and county fairs until her parents dealt the devastating blow of turning down Yajia’s breakout opportunity to join the cast of Argentina’s version of The Mickey Mouse Club.
As Yajia completed the manuscript that would become her memoir, a televised life flickered briefly in the story’s future when Selena Gomez – notably, a successful child star – optioned a script. Yajia considered, then, what actor could even attempt the herculean task of playing her young, hypersexualized, pathologically tormented, Madonna-obsessed self.
“I want to bring back Rodney Dangerfield from the dead and for him to play me,” Yajia admits, after dashing her hopes for an Argentine actor who could mimic her bilingual fluidity. “We’d have Rodney dressed in a little vinyl mini skirt with pigtails.”
Cry for Me, Argentina is full of many such unflinching, hilarious images, from her grandmother forcefully postponing her granddaughter’s birth in order to finish knitting a sweater to a sexual betrayal revealed through a shit-stained duvet. Beneath the comedic anecdotes belies a sincere coming-of-age story, told with stream-of-consciousness ease, about growing up amid constant nostalgia and narcissistic entrepreneurial turmoil. Complicated parental figures, embraced eccentricities, and a scrappy handling of mental health issues commingle empathetically in Yajia’s illustration of her family, making room for lighthearted antics and darker moments of desperation.
“The humor part makes it digestible, because I think that it is quite a dark book at times. And I’m a comedian, so I wasn’t setting out to write this tragic story. And the truth, the reality of my life, was that it was grotesque, funny, sad – all of it,” she explains.
In the memoir’s more meta pages, Yajia reveals the writing process as a therapeutic one, granting her an opportunity to examine the ways her childhood impacted her and reconsider some of the stories she’d told herself at a young age.
“If I could go back, I would have tried not to make it all so funny,” Yajia says, with a small ironic laugh. As a comedian and a longtime television writer (Hulu’s This Fool, Apple TV’s Acapulco), the Argentine-American admits her worldview around many of the things she experienced as a child skewed toward the ludicrous. Working with her editors helped her consider her comedic impulses and lean into the rejection and confusion she experienced as a young immigrant, an aspiring superstar, and growing woman.
As an adult, Yajia continues to spend time in Buenos Aires, where she was born, while living in Los Angeles, where her family eventually grew roots. Austin has become another home for the comedian, introduced by husband Patrick O’Connor, a longtime guitarist for Shakey Graves. On Tuesday, she reads from her book at BookPeople and discusses it with her friend, Austin-based actress, writer, and musician Stephanie Hunt. It feels like a homecoming of sorts for the story and its writer.
“We’ve known each other since we were young kids trying to make it in L.A., so it’s extra meaningful,” Yajia says, of sharing the stage with Hunt.
Performing as an author might not be the kind of show-stopping song-and-dance Yajia perfected as a scantily clad preteen, but reading and discussing the book with fellow creatives on this short tour scratches that initial inspiring itch that eventually led Yajia to a life led by humor and creativity.
“I think that the insecurity that I talk about in my earlier years still lingers with me,” she says. “But it’s so cool to see it change and evolve and [see] me tapping into my power.”
Tamara Yajia speaks at BookPeople tonight, Sept. 2, at 7pm.
