“My mother is so classy that you have to marry her and then wait a year before she gives you any play.” A year later, she fell in love with her paper husband. Her parents married when her father, who trained as an architect and worked as a taxi driver, offered to pay her mother to marry him so that he could apply for a green card.

Her sarcasm is on rueful display in her new memoir, “This Is Just My Face: Try Not to Stare” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), in which she writes of trying to please a father for whom she is too American, too vivid and altogether too much. Sidibe said - and who called his firstborn daughter “fatso,” as did her relatives, while outlining her future as a good Muslim wife. She deployed it to fine effect in her upside-down household in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, where she and her older brother were raised by their warm, Southern mother and stern African father, whose family traditions extended to polygamy - “I know!” Ms. Sidibe said, she was an entrenched outlier - sarcasm has been both weapon and armor. Like many smart young women whose precociousness put them at odds with their peers - by fourth grade, Ms. Daniels cracked up, and the deal was sealed. Sidibe told him, “but now that I’m going to be a movie star, I’m going to get pregnant by a basketball player and lock down that child support.” Mr. Sidibe, then a 24-year-old psychology major whose training as an actor had been confined to her work as a phone-sex operator, as well as roles in college productions of “Peter Pan” and “The Wiz,” answered tartly.

LOS ANGELES - On the night the director Lee Daniels offered Gabourey Sidibe the lead in “ Precious,” the role that would earn her an Oscar nomination, Mr.

This Is Just My Face by Gabourey Sidibe