It's Been Awhile

Didn't mean to take so much time off, but I'm back now. Have a review:

Tina Fey's first book, Bossypants, is more a collection of humorous essays than a memoir, and in this day and age of confession as a right, that's fine by me. Fey walks the fine line of sharing a part of herself beyond the Tine Fey brand we've gotten to know over the past decade and maintaining a level of privacy that she explicitly asks the reader to respect. I've cooled on the memoir in the last few years, realizing that no one's life is more disasterous, beautiful or sublime than the next person's, but I've grown an appreciation of the essay, that microscopic snapshot of a person's true reaction to a book, movie, school of thought and done right it can be a crisp and fully-realized piece of art. Fey succeeds brilliantly at disguising often biting commentary in the self-deprecating absurdist humor she excels at.

It's obvious that Fey's privacy is on her mind throughout the book. She brings up her famous scar, only to let you know she's not going to talk about it.

During the spring semester of kindergarten, I was slashed in the face by a stranger in
the alley behind my house. Don't worry. I'm not going to lay out the grisly details for
you like a sweeps episode of Dateline. I only bring it up to explain why I'm not going
to talk about it (pp 1, pg 8).

The material about her time at SNL is particularly insightful, I found it illuminating that someone of her stature would admit to not having any idea about what she was doing when she first started; it gives this novice writer hope that one day I'll figure it out.

There are moments in the book when Fey does get personal, as when she describes in hilarious detail her troubles breastfeeding her daughter, Alice and the Mother's Prayer at the end of the book asking God to guide her daughter to the right in all things, I saw through the humor to the heart of the piece and I admit it, I teared up.

Will Bossypants win Fey any new fans? Probably not because it's chockfull of all the things that the people who don't like her don't like about her, but for the people who do apprciate her absurdist satire, it'll be an easy read that brings tears to your eyes and makes you laugh out loud.