Since everybody else blessed with fingers has been writing about Tina Fey’s book, I guess I will too. I was fortunate enough to get my hands on a copy of Bossypants because I was home for the weekend and my mom had it. God knows, I can’t buy hardcover anymore. What am I, Pia Zadora?
I love Tina Fey. I have to. It’s the law. I’m a white, Jewish girl from the suburbs who reads Jezebel, works in media, and in high school I had bangs that covered my eyes like Boober from Fraggle Rock. I basically am her target audience.
But I have to admit, I was skeptical. Tina Fey is hilarious and intelligent, but writing a book is a skill just like writing and producing a television show. And possessing one of those skills does not necessarily mean possessing the other.
Overall, I approve. At times the book was a little rushed and disorganized but I laughed out loud several times and, most of all, I was very pleased with Fey’s insight into being a woman in a boys’ club profession and being the mother of a daughter. The kind of self-help Matzoh-dry literature one usually finds when looking for guidance on being a career woman is much too stringent. I’m not perfect, and I certainly can’t be expected to call out male co-workers every time they say something inappropriate. Asking for a raise is hard, what if I don’t have the guts? And, there is no ideal script for a job interview, so nobody can tell you what to say. Fey’s advice is realistic, comprised of embarrassing anecdotes and lessons she’s learned from her own experience. More than anything, her message is: we all take different paths, there’s no right or wrong way, and, when making tough decisions, it will probably turn out alright either way.
Recently, I faced a crossroads of sorts in my own professional path. I could not decide whether to go to graduate school, or to keep plugging along in the workforce and try to carve out a more traditional career for myself. My reluctance to make a decision was leaving me paralyzed. I thought by putting off a commitment to either road that I was keeping doors open but, in reality, I was emitting an aura of ambivalence that was keeping me from taking any steps forward.
My father used his stern, Jim Anderson voice on the phone with me. “Whatever choice you make won’t be wrong,” he said. “But you have to choose something. Stop being afraid of doing the wrong thing. There’s no set path. You are never going to be Tina Fey. You can’t be Tina Fey. You can only be you.”
He was right. But I think I needed to hear it from the horse’s mouth (no offense, Tina, I think you are beautiful and not horse-faced). And, if only for that valuable moral, Bossypants was an excellent read.
Some choice quotes to wet your whistle:
“May she play the Drums to the fiery rhythm of her Own Heart with the sinewy strength of her Own Arms, so she need Not Lie With Drummers” – from a mother’s prayer for her daughter
“I regularly ate health food cookies so disgusting that when I enthusiastically gave one to Rachel Dratch, she drew a picture of a rabbit and broke the cookie into a trail of tiny pieces coming out of the rabbit’s butt” – on being really thin at one point in her life
“I need to take my pants off as soon as i get home. I didn’t used to have to do that. But now I do” – on turning forty
“The definition of ‘crazy’ in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore” – needs no explanation
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