Bossypants by Tina Fey (2011. Little Brown. ISBN 978036056861)
Understand this: I love Tina Fey. She’s pretty, smart, has a great sense of humor, and, if all reports are accurate, a great mom and wife. Juggling being one of America’s premier female comedians, while producing and directing an award winning sit-com (30 Rock) along with parental and spousal duties and obligations is nothing to sneeze at. So when my wife received a copy of this book from our son and daughter-in-law, the memoir eventually made it to my reading stack. I don’t normally spend time with this sort of contemporary book but something about Fey’s intellect and career at Saturday Night Live as a writer and player intrigued me to dive in. I won’t say I was disappointed. I will say that, at the conclusion of the book, I really didn’t know Tina Fey much better than I did before cracking the cover.
First off, this really is a woman’s book. I know, I know. Right there all the feminists in my blogosphere are going to hit me with their purses. But Bossypants really isn’t what I thought it was; a tell-all retrospective look at Fey’s meteoric career in television. Rather, it’s a chronicle of her interactions with folks throughout her life, from gay pals during her adolescent summer stock years, to her rhetorical (not physical) love affair with the co-star of 30 Rock, Alec Baldwin. While post Neandrathal males like me can appreciate reading about womanly troubles and struggles in the contemporary entertainment world, the loosely chronological matter-of-fact structure of the book loses steam over time.
There are some funny and touching passages along the winding path Fey has constructed. Here’s a sampling of one such tidbit, where she talks about being Photoshopped for a magazine cover, that tickled my fancy:
But just be patient, for in a few weeks, the magazine will be out and you will have incontrovertible proof that you are a young Catherine Deneuve. You casually check the newsstand on your way to buy Bengay heating pads. One day, there it is! Right between Jessica Simpson and those people from The Bachelor who murdered each other-it’s your face! It is your face, right? You can barely recognize yourself with the amount of digital correction. They’ve taken out your knuckles and given you baby hands. The muscular calves that you’re generally very proud of are slimmed to the bone. And what’s with the eyes? They always get it wrong under the eyes. In an effort to remove dark circles they take out any depth, and your face looks like it was drawn on a paper plate. You looked forward to them taking out your chicken pox scars and broken blood vessels, but how do you feel when they erase part of you that is perfectly good?…Do I worry about overly retouched photos giving women unrealistic expectations and body image issues? I do. I think that we will soon see a rise in anorexia in women over seventy. Because only people over seventy are fooled by Photoshop. Only your great-aunt forwards you an image of Sarah Palin holding a rifle and wearing an American flag bikini and thinks it’s real.
Fey loosely chronicles her life in this effort, even discussing the attack she survived as a young girl, when a maniac attempted to carve her face with a knife, leaving a prominent scar as a reminder of evil. But there’s very little revelation included in that tale, or any of the other vignettes reproduced for public conception. Now, to be fair, I don’t think the author was attempting a serious telling of her life story. Rather, the book appears to be an extension, a longer version if you will, of interviews, sketches, and jokes that Fey has already exposed to the world. The only real moment in Fey’s writing, the only time she lets down her guard and ponders her humanity to any degree, comes at the very end. In the last chapter, she debates with herself about having another child at forty. There’s no question, as I’ve written, that Tina Fey appears to be a loving and caring mother to her daughter Alice. And maybe, just maybe, her marriage to Jeff is one of those rare Hollywood unions that can survive stardom. So it’s not for lack of a solid familial unit that Fey laments motherhood: It’s the debate between career and home that so many working moms (including my own wife) have confronted since the end of WWII in America. This is the one chapter, the one place in Bossypants where one of our most brilliant comic minds lets her guard down. But it comes too late in the effort to make this a “must read”.
If you enjoy comedy and Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock there’s enough here to keep you reading to the end but don’t expect to come away from Bossypants with a deeper understanding of what makes Tina Fey tick.
3 stars out of 5.
The card that came with the book. Maybe Tina should have written a faux biography of Sarah Palin instead!
