Customer Reviews

Bossypants

5 star:		(429)
4 star:		(129)
3 star:		(84)
2 star:		(52)
1 star:		(41)

 

 

I enjoy a good memoir. It seems there's always something good to learn from other people's life experiences. And while I'm not a huge Tina Fey fan, I enjoyed her as Sarah Palin on SNL and occasionally watch 30 Rock. So after reading a review of the book, and being without anything to read at the moment, I took a chance and bought Bossypants, and I'm glad I did.

It seemed a little uneven starting out, but quickly transitioned into some very interesting pieces about her early jobs, her work with Second City, and then her transition into writing for SNL and her eventual creation of 30 Rock. Interspersed are stories about growing up and dating, her eventual marriage, and her struggles to balance work and family life, as well as some candid advice for other women on how to make it in a male-dominated industry.

Perhaps what I liked most about the book is that even though there is a lot of self-deprecating (and distancing) humor, my sense in the end was that Fey gave us an honest look at who she is: imperfect, stumbling, but always rising again, persevering, and continuing to do what she loves. I would say the book is well worth reading for any fan of Tina Fey, 30 Rock, or SNL, as well as for any woman who struggles to balance the roles of worker, spouse and mom. It was a good read!

I almost gave this book 5 stars, and it is damn near perfect.

Let's start with the good stuff:
- It's extremely funny. And not just "laugh out loud" funny, but "laugh *so* out loud your spouse asks you to go read in another room because you're keeping him awake" funny. If you enjoy Tina Fey's humor, you'll really appreciate this book. It's damn funny.

- It's (unexpectedly) full of really good advice about how to be a good boss. I mean, maybe I should have gleaned that from the title but I expected it to be more of a comedic autobiography than a sincere look at how to effectively manage people. And she's got some really great thoughts in this book about how to be a leader.

- Where books by other comedians are pretty much only for laughs (see: Chelsea Handler), this book also contains some social critique. And, not in a preachy way - in a very funny way. But Fey raises some excellent questions about how women treat each other, being a working mom, dealing with institutionalized sexism, and other hilarious topics!

I found myself wanting to know a bit more about SNL, or 30 Rock, but she keeps those experiences (and her personal life) at a pretty surface level. It appears to be a very conscious choice, and one I respect; you can tell she doesn't want to be a tell-all kind of person, and she's not interested in being the sort of celebrity that rips her whole life open for all to see.

All-in-all, I loved this book and devoured it in one day (not an easy feat with two preschool-aged kids running around).

My only gripe is that it's a little hard to tell what this book is trying to be. It's part comedy, part biography and part managerial guidance/life lessons. Not that that's a bad combination - it was just a little unexpected. And, at times, felt a little jumpy.

I read this book in its entirety in under 24 hours (AND I still managed to stick in sleep, work, and 3 squares). This book is perfect for anyone who loves Tina Fey's sarcastic wit. It's an insanely fast read and it literally made me laugh out loud in spots. Granted, if you're not a Fey fan, you probably won't like the bulk of this book. It's no shock-and-awe campaign either; you won't find any secrets here. In essence, this book is exactly what I thought (and hoped) it would be: 280 pages of Feytastic wordage. Fey is quite the wordsmith - no surprise there - and she really can weave a story. Some chunks of the book are stuff you've probably already heard/seen/read - SNL sketch scripts, 30 Rock lines, etc. And if you get the Kindle version some of the graphics outside the regular text will be hard to read (unless I'm just a moron) - but I give this book 5+ stars. Tina Fey is a smart and sassy woman, and her book is no different. I highly recommend it to fans of 30 Rock, SNL, and cake.

Like most women of my generation, I am a fan of Tina Fey. She is a weekly beacon of joy in a sea of unlikable, unrelatable portrayals of women in the media. So it kills me that I didn't like her book!

Two things:

1. Her dry, punchy humor is wonderful for writing performances, but I don't think it works well in long format. She's not so much the best story-teller. Rarely did I find myself captivated by anything in the book or wanting to read more, which made me feel like....

2. She's a very reluctant memoir-writer. The tone often made me feel like I was intruding somehow by reading what she wrote. There are points where she outright says she doesn't want to discuss certain events (*perfectly* understandable.) But her stories feel glossed-over and the people she discusses feel liks frameworks of characters.

(I loved the chapter about her father. It felt rich and I totally understood who he was and how he shaped her life. If the rest of the book had been like that, it would've been great.)

Love Tina Fey and I'll continue to watch 30 Rock like a junkie. But it kills me that I'm not recommending this to my friends. (I'm not a total downer: if you want a fun memoir, I'd choose Kathy Griffin's instead... just because I think she's a bit better at crafting a story.)

Last weekend I had the great pleasure of listening to Tina Fey's book Bossypants read by the author herself. Not only is the lady fantastically funny, she's also got something to say. Plus, on the audiobook, she does the Sarah Palin parts in her Sarah Palin voice. And, if you're anything like me, you'd be very interested in Fey's own take on the Palin phenomena and her role in it. Fey isn't writing a straight memoir here. The breakdown is something like this:

46% Celebrity memoir
28% Essay collection
12% Feminist manifesto
9% Stand-up routine
5% Self-help manual

She does cover the major highlights of her life (roots, family, education, career, marriage, motherhood, and miscellany) in a semi-chronological fashion. The book is made up of two dozen or so short chapters, each an essay. Some of the essays are very personal, such as a portrait of her father, or the tale of her disastrous honeymoon. Others were about female empowerment, such as chapters on body image and the fact that women can be just as funny as men.

Speaking of funny... I don't think it will come as a surprise to anyone that Tina Fey is hilarious. I laughed out loud through this entire book. I'm sure it was all the more amusing coming straight from her mouth. (By the way, I was surprised to learn that she's not a half-bad mimic. She does a passable take on Lorne Michaels, Alec Baldwin, Amy Poehler, and other recognizable friends she quotes within the text.) While some chapters were incidentally funny, a handful of them were loosely disguised comedy bits.

It was amusing the way she kept divorcing herself from celebrity. She spoke about glamorous movies stars as though she hasn't made the lists of Hollywood's most beautiful and powerful. Somehow she's retained an everywoman quality that leaves her relatable and approachable. By the end of this slight book, I felt I knew a lot more about Fey. I liked and respected her even more than I had going in. And I was thoroughly entertained. I can't ask more than that.

I love Tina Fey - don't get me wrong. But this book - an autobiography supposedly - reveals very little. There are a lot of "cheats": samples of scripts for example which were just page fillers. I would have liked to know her first writing successes and who taught her or influenced her - her first well-received work, and perhaps a failure that was a learning opportunity. I'd like to know more about her mother - who is barely mentioned - and her sibling(s). Are they writers too? If no one in her family showed a talent for writing, what made her start? Why did she join an improv group? How did she meet her husband? Everybody loves a great love story! Anyway - I still love her and think she's brilliant, but this book was a bit of a disappointment.

I initially wanted to rate this three stars, because I was feeling generous. Very generous. But then I wrote this review, and I realized: two stars is more than enough.

Because this isn't a book. This is a couple of seemingly stand-alone pieces that are glued together by mostly inferior writing. And I expect much better from the woman who once ran the writers' room at Saturday Night Live.

There are the occasional glimpses of what could have been a much more enjoyable read, but you have to endure too much prose that's in dire search of a decent editor. Far too often this book feels like Tina Fey dumped a manuscript on a publisher's desk and said "this will do" and no one dared to point out "well, not exactly..." In fact, I repeatedly had the impression she wrote the book against her will, as if it was some kind of contractual obligation.

I don't get why she bothered to write a book about herself, when she clearly doesn't want to reveal anything -- which she inevitably does anyway, even though those things are masked by feeble punchlines and meandering anecdotes.

Biggest disappointments are the pages where she answers online criticism (pointless and sad) and those where she recounts her imitations of Sarah Palin (preposterously self-important).

Clunky. Badly written. Unfunny. Superficial. Tedious. Those aren't words I should be considering when reviewing a book written by a comedian.

I love Tina Fey. From SNL to 30 Rock to Sarah Palin impersonations to Megamind, she has continued to impress me, not only as a comedian, but as a writer and thoughtful entertainer as well.

Bossypants is an honest and hilarious memoir by one of New York's 50 Most Powerful Women (NY Post). This is not a Hollywood tell-all, but an engaging and interesting behind-the-scenes look at an "achievement-oriented, drug-free, adult virgin" (3). Fey admits, these are "lurid tales of anxiety and cowardice" (4). And many of them are gut wrenching!

Though this book is honest, it often reads like one joke after another. The reader may still feel distanced from the real Tina Fey after reading Bossypants, but I think the opposite is true. The constant humor, the one-liners, the self-deprecation is who she really is, which makes her writing and comedy work.

Fey's chapter entitled "A Childhood Dream, Realized," in which she recounts her first meeting with Lorne Michaels and the beginnings of her career at SNL, is worth the price of the book.

This is a fun and funny book. Enjoy.

Look, I like Tina Fey a lot. I think she's funny and smart and interesting. I just don't think that this book is any of those things. I definitely laughed out loud a couple of times while reading this book, but overall, it felt more like someone threw a bunch of semi-amusing anecdotes together and then hurriedly attempted some weak transition paragraphs. The lack of actual narrative really kept me from enjoying this one. This book is a quick read, but that's about all it has going with it. A perfectly fine airport read, if you kind of want to put your brain on autopilot (ha! airport pun!), but I guess I was hoping for a more insightful memoir.

I liked Tina Fey until I read this. I was very disappointed. The writing is excellent, the wit acerbic, but it was very superficial (I don't know why it wouldn't be, most memoirs are) and found the most interesting person in the book to be her Father.
When I finished I no longer cared much about Ms Fey. Maybe "bitchypants" would have been a better title but I found her to be rather boring. While most memoirs are about the person writing it, I found little likeable in the book and
felt it was written with a heavy hand. Her dislikes are quite vivid but I came away with a generally negative impression, not quite knowing what she LIKES, other than personal accolades.