On her way to becoming an award-winning superstar, Tina Fey struggled through some questionable haircuts, some after-school jobs, the rise of nachos as a cultural phenomenon, a normal childhood, a happy marriage and joyful motherhood. Now she can reflect on what she's learned: you're no one until someone calls you bossy.
...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.
