Sarah Cooper, the comedian who rose to fame with her satirical TikTok lip-sync videos of Donald Trump, was — unexpectedly — inspired by Dale Carnegie for her next project.
Her new audiobook, “Let’s Catch Up Soon: How I Won Friends and Influenced People Against My Will,” is scheduled to premiere June 23 exclusively on Audible. It’s billed as a “self-help memoir,” in which Cooper takes on one of life’s new challenges: connecting with people face to face after years of COVID isolation.
Written between 2019-21, “Let’s Catch Up Soon” tackles the challenges of going back out into the world and seeing the bottom halves of people again. The project started when Cooper was asked to write a new take on the granddaddy of all self-help books, Carnegie’s best-selling “How to Win Friends and Influence People” — and her initial take was, “It sucked.”
According to Cooper, “it all sounded like a bunch of manipulative BS. People pleasers know all these tricks all too well, Dale! So, my plan was to rip this Dale person apart.” But then she had an existential crisis (which involved edibles) that made Cooper realize she was lonely and wanted friends and community. So she decided to start trying Carnegie’s tricks instead — and discovered that they worked.
“This little Dale Carnegie book project morphed into something I wasn’t planning or expecting. It changed when I changed, and then it changed me,” she said in a statement.
Each chapter of “Let’s Catch Up Soon” contains stories from Cooper’s childhood growing up as the youngest of four in a family of Jamaican immigrants, to working in the corporate world while pursuing a career in entertainment, to everything that happened when she went from unknown comedian to hosting “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” starring in her own Netflix special, “Sarah Cooper: Everything’s Fine,” and speaking at the 2020 Democratic National Convention.
In the audiobook, Cooper gets to the heart of what it means to be there for your family, become a good friend (and when she wasn’t the friend she wanted to be), and live a truly social life, according to Audible. She also talks about working at Google, finding her voice as a comedian, how her family’s life and her sibling’s struggles have motivated her — and why Hall and Oates’ “Sara Smile” should be banished.
Cooper, one of PvNew‘s “10 Comics To Watch for 2020,” stars in James Ponsoldt’s latest film, “Summering,” which premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and will be released in July.
