MixedThe New Republic...a collection of biographical riffs on puberty, parenting, and being female in a male-dominated field ... Neurosis has long been useful in the entertainment world. For Woody Allen, neurosis is existential, with philosophical ambitions...If Allen’s neurosis springs from someplace deep, Fey’s is benign and mainly cosmetic. She has some genuine trauma in her past, but she chooses not to dwell on it ... In her account of herself...Fey is distilled into a mild current of anxious energy, perfectly likable and inoffensive, coasting to the top of her field on a tide of awkward charm ... Fey’s memoir is wholly cleansed of any real darkness. It preempts any probing into real frailties and flaws. Of course, this is the point; it is designed to disarm. Neurosis makes Bossypants funny (and it is very funny), but it is fueled by reflexive self-deprecation instead of real reflection ... The book seems animated by the sense of a live audience, by an anxiousness to please the crowd. As such, it expertly does what it sets out to do, which is to entertain, to draw laughs, and to let its author seem authentic and vulnerable while reinforcing her public image as a mousy nerd who stumbled into fame and glamour. But the book is more brand extension than memoir: it is almost three hundred pages of Liz Lemon monologues ... Fey is certainly eager to please, but bossy she is not.
Jennifer duBois
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewDuBois tells a tight story with boldface themes. Drama is constant. Conversations get right to the point. Everything means something. Chess is politics or sometimes war. Losing is dying. There are many gloomy musings on mortality and memory and love. But even with such high emotional stakes, Irina’s and Aleksandr’s self-absorption leaves the story somewhat cold ... They expend so much energy worrying about their fates that it feels almost redundant for us to do so ... But this is just the point duBois wants to make — that obsessing over your own end is a kind of vanity ... There are echoes of the Russia of Gary Shteyngart’s fiction here ... It’s a surprisingly happy ending for a book that purports to teach us how to live when the possibility of a happy ending is foreclosed.
