Tina Fey – Bossypants

I am not so much with the audiobooks because of my poor attention span and tendency to drift off in the middle……what? It’s too easy to start thinking about something else and wake up with a start three minutes later realising that crucial plot things have happened without you having noticed. But as I get more and more pregnant, I seem to have fewer and fewer thoughts, and less and less ability to look at words on the page. Both are too big a hindrance to my mindless staring out of the window. So, thought I would try audiobooks again. If nothing else, maybe dull narrators would help combat the ridiculous insomnia.

No danger of falling asleep when Tina Fey is around though. The only danger is falling off the ladder while you are trying to paint the walls while listening to Tina talking about her experiences of theatre camp because you are laughing too much.

My only experience of Saturday Night Live was during my student year in the US, and so my memories of Fey reading the Weekend Update are recalled through a haze of Mike’s Hard Lemonade (I have never been a cool drinker). I’m much more of a fan through 30 Rock and Mean Girls and Date Night. But I know enough to know that she is a goddess. Socially awkward, self-deprecating, a massive geek – she is like ALL OF US if only everything we said was a minature comedy masterpiece. And she proves, should proof be needed, that feminism does not mean being angst-ridden and hand-wringing and academic-humourless. (Why should it be? Not sure, but that’s certainly one of the easy stereotypes.) So on the infamous Sarah Palin sketch, “you all watched a sketch show about feminism and you didn’t even realise it because of all the jokes. It’s like when Jessica Seinfeld puts spinach in kids’ brownies. Suckers!”

I have read several traditional reviews complaining that there aren’t any shockers or revelations in this book. This is silly. Memoir does not HAVE to mean maximum bean-spillage. What if there actually AREN’T any skeletons in the cupboard? What if, god forbid, she chooses not to go into every detail of her husband’s and daughter’s lives out of respect for their privacy? What if, shock horror, she realises that telling comedy anecdotes about the rich and famous might be good for a laugh but probably isn’t going to do much for the old career if she’s got to continue working with these people for the next forty years?

Get the audiobook and have happy times with Tina, that’s all I have to say.