...any concern that Fey, like so many before her, has been ruined by fame is quickly dispelled by Bossypants, a book that reminds you why Fey has succeeded where so many have failed — because she is precise, professional and hilarious ... inside lies a collection of autobiographical essays that should (but of course won’t) prove once and for all that pretty is nowhere near as important as funny, and funny doesn’t work without that rare balance of truth and heart ... In chapter after chapter, in a voice consistently recognizable as her own, Fey simply tells stories of her life ... Fey has a great sense of pace and timing — longer, weightier chapters dealing with her profession and her career are balanced with short pieces on being fat and being thin and some responses to evil email — and a love of language that echoes early Nora Ephron and, before that, the marvelous Jean Kerr ... Amazingly, absurdly, deliriously funny. Everything you would hope for from this book — it’s impossible to put down, you will laugh until you cry, you will wish it were longer, you can’t wait to hand it to every friend you have — is true.
...[a] dagger-sharp, extremely funny new book for which even the blurbs are clever ... Bossypants isn’t a memoir. It’s a spiky blend of humor, introspection, critical thinking and Nora Ephron-isms for a new generation ... For all Ms. Fey’s efforts to depict herself as 'a little tiny person with nothing to worry about running in circles, worried out of her mind,' she comes off as a strongly opinionated dynamo with a comedic voice that is totally her own. Ms. Fey, like Ms. Ephron, is at her most hilariously self-deprecating when it comes to her attractiveness and vanity ... Ms. Fey deftly contrasts her show business and homebody aspects in Bossypants, very much the way her 30 Rock character, Liz Lemon, flits between drudgery and fantasy. The voice of this book is quite similar to that of the television show, though Ms. Fey attributes much of the success of 30 Rock to Alec Baldwin. She can’t say the same for her domesticated side.
Hilarious confessions seem to spring unbidden from Tina Fey in Bossypants, but don’t be fooled: The artistry of her autobiography-turned-polemic raises the bar for every comedian who dares put cursor to Word doc ... Preserving the comic voice she honed for years onstage and on SNL, Fey lets her jokes travel unintercepted to the ends of her sentences, magnifying their impact with the element of surprise. She’s also joyously, unexpectedly blunt about her weaknesses and disappointments, from 30 Rock’s ratings troubles to her indecisiveness over whether to have another child ... Time and power allow her to calmly dissect the obstacles she faced, while gleefully skewering the sexist, misogynistic views she was expected to take for granted on her way up, including the myth that her presence prevented another woman’s progress. Embedding her life with a sharp critique of the world that shaped her is painstaking work, but Fey jabs and punches artfully, tempering herself with self-deprecation instead of self-pity. Even as she declares her effortlessness to be an illusion, Fey makes her potent combination of wit and attack look easy.
Bossypants is not so much a memoir as it is a sort of here's-what-happened-and-why-I think-this kind of book. It's honest and intimate, without any maudlin tales of childhood sorrow, no extraneous snark or hit-and-run tell-all gossip. It's just a great read from a mature thinker ... Particularly hilarious were the chapters on her honeymoon and having a child — again thankfully devoid of hackneyed sentiment. Another area of interest to me was Tina's discussion of what happened when she impersonated Sarah Palin on SNL and became a target of ill-founded wrath. Regrettably, it's always been easy to marshal cultural hostility toward women ... It is difficult to be a woman or a person of color in the entertainment industry, but this book is not about that. Tina Fey is part of a generation of women who have changed the face of comedy at Second City, SNL, in sitcoms and in film. In front of and behind the camera. And that is my book review.
A more responsible journalist might have passed on this review - conflict of interest, professionalism, blah blah blah - but this one could not. So, in the interest of full disclosure, a confession: This review is more biased than Tina Fey is popular on Emmy night. That, and I think I'm in love with her ... In short, Tina Fey makes me depressed that I'm not Tina Fey. Luckily, Bossypants - despite its telling but also mildly sexually confusing cover of Fey's head on a man's body - is a very satisfying consolation prize ... It's Fey's biting wit - lovely as long as it's not directed at you, am I right, Paris Hilton? - that carries her almost effortlessly ... But don't expect any shocking revelations, as Fey's mostly tight-lipped about her family and never one to emotionally overshare, leaving her deepest self right where it belongs, in the best-friend fantasies of funny girls everywhere.
...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.
...an evasive memoir starring an absent Tina Fey; it reads like a sketch show, obviously. I’m not actually sure Fey wanted to write it. I think someone stuck a gun made of dollars at her and made her write it ... 'I have a uniquely German capacity to vacillate between sentimentality and coldness,' she murmurs, but of the real Tina Fey, that is all you get ... Fey has two problems in Bossypants. First, she doesn’t want to tell us anything and keeps telling us she doesn’t want to tell us anything – hear this enough, and you will want to stop listening. It leaks out anyway...but always with a gag on top, which works in comedy, because that is what comedy is for, self-protection, but not in memoir. I’m Tina Fey! Back off! If you come closer, I’ll hit you in the face with a joke! Everything in Tina Fey land is in the service of the punchline. This works in comedy; in narrative it sounds like a woman tied to a chair with a pen superglued to her finger, sobbing ... The second problem is that Fey obviously thinks celebrities are ridiculous. Of course she does, she’s smart...But she’s one of Them now ... And that is Bossypants – the book where Tina Fey fell down a hole, papered with $5 million. She made a mistake that no comic should make, particularly the most famous female comic in the world. She didn’t get angry – or truthful – enough.
Oh Tina. I do slightly wish you hadn't. And I say this from a place of love. It's just that why, if you're the pre-eminent female comedy writer of your generation, the genius behind 30 Rock, the woman who gave the world the other Sarah Palin, the most influential female comedian working today, would you want to throw yourself on the rocks that have smashed so many before you: the comedy book. Worse, the comedy memoir, although Bossypants takes the interesting approach to memoir of remembering almost nothing, and providing 'revelations' that might more accurately be called 'concealments' ... Which isn't to say that it's unenjoyable. There are some hugely funny bits, and some inspiring bits, and some nerdishly interesting bits, and some bits that read like essays in the New Yorker (which in fact two of the chapters were). There's lots to enjoy, particularly if you are, as I am, a Tina Fey fan girl. It's just the bookiness of it. Fey is out of her genre, and it shows: it takes an age to get going, and it's less like prose non-fiction than a sketch comedy in book form, with a disproportionate number of one-liners, not all of which work ... Fey's strength as a writer and a performer is that she's never been afraid to make comedy out of female vulnerability, or to twist it around, to invert it, to give it a provocative edge. And so it is here ... njoyable, then, but as a fan girl, I have to say that I do slightly wish she'd stick to the genre she does so superlatively well: television comedy.
It’s probably unwise to expect soul-baring candor from a book with a made-up biographical note on the jacket flap. Those who hoped Tina Fey...would shed her comedic persona and play it straight are going to find her sort-of memoir, Bossypants, disappointing. At times, it’s almost like Fey and Liz Lemon, the self-loathing comedy writer Fey plays on the show, are struggling, exorcism-style, for control of the book: Just as Fey lets her guard down and introduces a serious topic, Lemon milks it for the gag. But that’s okay — because I would gladly read a book by Liz Lemon. In fact, I have ... The writing doesn’t so much flow from one topic to another as stop for scene changes. Sketch comedy, meet sketch narrative ... Fey doesn’t say much about what she thinks is funny or why. But, then, this isn’t really a book about the making of a comedian; it’s a book about the making of a woman ... And just because she’s funny doesn’t mean she’s not fuming: A vein of righteous feminist indignation runs through the book ... There’s a certain strain of human behavior that Fey labels 'May I be amazing at you?' and is clearly hoping to avoid ... The life coach in me wants her to knock it off and own her awesomeness. The cynic in me suspects that she does, but she’s too shrewd to let on.
...for all the jibes about how to deal with right-wing internet commentators and arch-less Greek eyebrows, Tina Fey refuses to discuss her role in contemporary culture. Maybe she doesn’t understand it herself. The result is a joke-driven memoir that resonates like a punchline without the setup ... Bossypants ... has the unflattering photos and body hair jokes that belie a painful coming of age, but Fey doesn’t like to go beyond a funny image. The occasional emotional risks are the book’s biggest rewards ... Bossypants is a book about how an industrious yet repressed woman found herself incredibly uncomfortable with being famous at age 40. It is not a book about feminist roles and having it all — Fey is pro Photoshop and anti soapbox. The result is a pleasant read that won’t exactly please anyone. Fey’s proponents will say that she is feckless, Fey’s detractors will look at the cover of a lady clad in a bowler hat and man arms and scream. Regardless, we need Tina Fey more than she needs us. The lady hero shall live on.
...[a] decidedly unrevealing memoir ... That's not to say Bossypants isn't a non-stop feast of gimlet-eyed wit -- Fey's legion of fans will get their money's worth -- but the feeling that she is unwilling to write about subjects such as her husband (a shadowy presence who undergoes several half-joking name changes) or how she felt after she got that scar on her cheek...mean this is a few home truths short of an autobiography. Instead, Fey serves up an idiosyncratic mish mash of her world view illustrated with relevant anecdotes, riffs and jokes -- and mostly gets away with it.
It’s Fey’s custom-quality, handcrafted BS detector that makes Bossypants so irresistible. In this genially jumbled memoir-esque collection of riffs, essays, laundry lists, true stories, fantasy scenarios, SNL script excerpts, and embarrassing photos from the wilderness years before she received the gift of a flattering haircut, the great Miz Fey puts on the literary equivalent of a satisfying night of sketch comedy. As a result, some of the bits are better than others ... But Fey remains notably selective about the information she shares; while making jokes at her own expense, she maintains an inviolable sense of privacy. It’s the more freewheeling, improvised chapters that capture Fey at her sharpest (and most influentially feminist) ... Oh, and a note to those who would ask Fey, a working mother, 'How do you juggle it all?': Don’t ask! If she knew how to juggle it all, she wouldn’t be so funny. Or such an excellent Bossypants.
One of the world’s cleverest comedy writers debuts with a frequently hilarious memoir ... Fey is such a fluid writer, with her impeccable sense of comic timing extending to the printed page, that near-constant jokes and frequent sidebars won’t keep readers from breezing through the book with little trouble, laughing most of the way. Though she rarely breaks the onslaught of jokes (most at her own expense), she does offer an insightful section on the exhaustively analyzed concept of the 'working mom,' which she finds tedious ... Fey may not sling a lot of dirt about her many famous co-stars...but her thoughts on her geeky adolescence, the joys of motherhood and her rise to TV stardom are spot-on and nearly always elicit a hearty laugh.
