When Tina Fey signed a book contract in the fall of 2008, at the height of her Sarah Palin–portraying ubiquity, some of her fans may have felt a twinge of unease. Was Fey heading into the realm of celebrity cash-in books? Would she write a vacuous memoir with a glossy picture on the cover? I know I was worried. But the arrival of the delightful Bossypants doesn’t just put those fears to rest — it makes me want to apologize for the brain spasm that caused me to forget Fey’s foremost talent: writing. From her days as the first female head writer at Saturday Night Live to scripting Mean Girls to creating 30 Rock, she’s always produced things we want to watch. Why not a book that fans and even nonfans would want to read? As she cheerfully suggests in her faux-huckster’s introduction, “Maybe you bought this book because you love Sarah Palin and you want to find reasons to hate me. We’ve got that!”
The spoofy cover suggests Fey wasn’t blind to the possibility of some backlash for her megamillion celebrity book contract. There she is, as glossy and pretty as you please, except she has the torso and hands of an overweight, hairy man. She’s also posed to show the long, thin scar on her face, the one everyone asks about, discussion of which she usually dodges. “Still me,” this cover seems to smirk. “Take it or leave it.”
You should take it. Bossypants is uneven and jagged in a way you might expect from one practiced in sketch comedy and sitcoms, but it’s also loaded with personality, insights into power and the kind of humor that can cause beverages to travel through the reader’s nasal passages unplanned. It’s not a traditional memoir, though it’s presented in chronological chapters, beginning in childhood and ending with Fey at 40, debating whether she should pause in her success to have a second child. It hovers in the territory of Nora Ephron or David Sedaris, and while Fey is not nearly as fluid as those masters of the heartfelt and hilarious personal essay, you sense her warming to the form. She takes us briskly through her professional history, from being shouted at by patrons of the YMCA , which is usually followed by a fantasy about quitting her job. Then she remembers the 200 people who work on 30 Rock, the ones who depend on her for their livelihood. And so Bossypants goes back to work. Lucky them — and lucky us that somewhere in there, she juggled this book into being.
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