Bossypants

by Tina Fey, Reagan Arthur Books. 275 pages.

Like Kristi Koruna, the object of a ten year crush that lasted until I was 18, Tina Fey always manages to prompt a series of sweaty palms, giddiness and a complete inability to articulate my own thoughts. In Ms. Fey's case, however, this is a purely artistic crush. I usually respond to an episode of 30 Rock with the same sweaty-palmed uncertainty that happened whenever Kristi Koruna walked into the room: in other words, if my life was a summer camp social (and sometimes I think it is) Tina Fey's work is the girl I want to dance with to Stairway to Heaven. I probably won't ever get asked to write an episode of 30 Rock (mostly because I'd just screw it up), so I suspect that writing about Bossypants is as close as I'll ever come to dancing with Ms. Fey's talent.



Part memoir, part satire of memoirs (only Ms. Fey could accomplish such a thing), Bossypants is a collection of essays that, when read together, gives you a loose description of Ms. Fey's life: awkward child turned improv queen is tapped to write for SNL which leads eventually to 30 Rock, several Emmys and an identity as the go-to girl for Sarah Palin impersonations. Within this framework there is Ms. Fey's trademark deprecatory humor, parodies of other celebrity memoirs, anecdotes about famous folk and one or two clever rants about the volatile mixture of femininity, motherhood and show business.

Most celebrity memoirs are tales of triumphs over adversity - for Carrie Fisher it was addiction; for Michael J. Fox, it was Parkinson's disease. Inbetween the pithy one-liners, what one gathers from Bossypants is that while other celebs are dealing with drugs and illness, Ms. Fey is confronted time and again with her own femininity. This emerges as Ms. Fey's most dominant theme: the struggles to succeed as a woman in a male dominant industry where women are too-often reduced to being sex symbols or stereotypes. Her most serious moments (and even those are pretty damn funny) come towards the end of the book when she struggles with the reality of her age. "Science," she writes, "shows that fertility and movie offers drop off steeply for woman after forty." Ms. Fey knows all too well the world she works in and, with typical self-effacing wit, asks the reader for help deciding what she should do "with the last five minutes" of her fame.


But I wouldn't want you to think Bossypants is some diatribe; Ms. Fey is a humorist - she recently won the Mark Twain prize - and for her the comedy always trumps politics. And while Bossypants is probably intended as a bible for the already converted, it is entirely possible that this book may just create one or two Tine Fey fans who thought they were going to read an expose about what Alec Baldwin is really like (that's in here too, but I won't give it away).