I have been meaning to read this week’s selection for almost a year! Last June, I bought Bossypants, the absolute perfect beach read. For whatever reason, though, I put it off until this week. That was crazy-pants of me, actually, because Tina Fey’s memoir is (unsurprisingly) the funniest book I’ve read in a long while.
Readers expecting a soul-bearing, heart-wrenching memoir will be disappointed – Fey occasionally skirts around more serious topics, only to return to her usual humor in the following sentence. The whole book reads like a series of clever set-ups and punchlines, one leading into the other.
One of my (and my mom’s) favorite excerpts from Bossypants is Fey’s “prayer” for her daughter. A few key lines:
“May she be Beautiful but not Damaged, for it’s the Damage that catches the creepy soccer coach’s eye, not the Beauty.”
“When the Crystal Meth is offered, may she remember the parents who cut her grapes in half and stick with Beer.”
Proving that humor can still be resonant, Fey gives her readers some valuable advice about being a woman in the workforce. She recalls her time as head writer on Saturday Night Live, answering questions that would never, ever be asked of a man (for example, “What’s it like to be the boss?”). In an address to aspiring “working women,” Fey makes this astute observation: “You’re not in competition with other women, you’re in competition with everyone.”
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at BU chapter.