Bossypants

I'm sure a lot of you have seen this book around. The cover is really so gross. I couldn't handle looking at it.

The book itself, however, is very funny. There are a couple of F words, which is disappointing, but I thought it was really funny. It's sort of a memoir, but sort of just a collection of essays about different things in her life. Like there's a chapter about her dad, who sounded awesome. He was like a scary dad who everyone just respects the moment they meet him. And there's a chapter about starting at Saturday Night Live, and one about leaving to create 30 Rock, a chapter about her honeymoon cruise to Bermuda and how the ship caught on fire and everyone had to fly back to New York--stuff like that.

It was really fast, too. I picked it up from the library on Friday and finished it on Saturday. I probably spent 5 hours reading the whole thing. So it goes fast.

One of my favorite things about the book was the girl power-ness of it. I really liked that. She brings in little feminist elements throughout the whole thing, but my favorite part was when she talked about working at Second City, an improv group in Chicago. The improv group had a touring company, which toured, obviously, and a mainstage company, which put on shows in Chicago. The mainstage company had always been 6 people. 4 men, 2 women. When she was working there, they suggested that they change it to 3 men and 3 women. And the people in charge, whoever they were, argued that having an equal number wouldn't work, because there wouldn't be enough parts for all the girls. Tina Fey called this her first experience with the illusion of not enough. She was like, "Not enough parts? We're not doing Death of a Salesman. This is improv. We're making it up, it's not even real. Of course there will be enough parts." And for some reason that little experience was my favorite part of the book.

So yeah. It was good, it was fast, and I laughed out loud frequently. Excellent book by my favorite funny lady.