Bossypants – Tina Fey

It's fair to say that the only real thing I knew about Tina Fey until recently was the impressions that she did of Sarah Palin during the run up to the 2008 US Presidential elections. She did such a good job that footage of her went completely global, and some news organisations even got so confused that they included a clip of her in a bulletin whilst saying that it was Sarah Palin!

My knowledge of her pretty much ended there though. I knew she'd been involved in Saturday Night Live (SNL) and that that was where her Palin impressions started, but I didn't know that she'd also been a writer there, or what she had done before or since.

I was somewhat intrigued therefore when Mr C presented me with a copy of Bossypants as a Valentines' Day gift. It wasn't a book I'd heard of, but just a few pages in I was hooked. Fey's writing style is infectious and even reading about how she tried to hold down a job as a receptionist in a YMCA whilst starting off her comedy career brought about many laugh out loud moments. Reading about her time on SNL was a bit harder going, mainly because I just didn't know about many of the "famous" people that she was talking about. I've never watched SNL and I'm also not a huge film watcher, meaning that there are plenty of famous people, especially film stars, that I wouldn't recognise even if I found them sitting in my living room. I did wonder if I should stop and look up who everyone was as I was reading, but to be honest life's too short.

What I was really not expecting from this book was the chapters that came at the end all about her experiences as a mother. Her experiences of the changes that are involved in becoming a mother are written about in her usual blunt and humourous manner. When you're going through it yourself if can be hard see the funny side of things, but certainly looking back you can and that's exactly what Fey picks up on. The personal conflicts involved in returning to work after having your first child also made me realise that all women go through the same things, regardless of whether they're an admin assistant somewhere or a famous commedienne.

If I weren't a parent I'm not sure I would have enjoyed this latter part of the book quite so much, but to me it actually made the book. It really showed me a very human side of Tina Fey as a woman and mother. If you know more than me about famous Americans you'll also probably get a lot more out of the rest of the book too!