Bossypants by Tina Fey

Pub Date: April 2011

Non-Fiction (Adult)

Memoir/Humor

288 pgs.

Here is a tribute to the power of audiobooks, if there ever was one.  I have a feeling that if I’d read the print version of this memoir by Tina Fey, I would have given the book maybe 3 stars out of 5.  Not because Fey isn’t funny, but because her slightly disorganized, stream-of-consciousness style may feel lacking in book form. The audio version, however, gets a full 5 stars.  This is because it is narrated by Tina Fey herself,  a natural performer.  Listening to, rather than reading, Fey’s musings feels like consuming them in their purest form.

Fey’s subject matter is lightly told and feels somewhat insubstantial at times.  She weaves scant traces of memoir–that is, stories of her upbringing and her family–in with more general anecdotes about her time on Saturday Night Live, her TV show, 30 Rock, and her experiences as the mother of a young daughter.   It’s something to page through, a few pages at a time, but not something to sit down and be absorbed in cover-to-cover.

But as an audiobook, her format works beautifully.  I popped it in my car stereo before a car trip with my mom–it was just before Mother’s Day–and we started laughing almost immediately.  From Fey’s stories of the drama camp she attended as a teenager, to her work with Chicago improv troupe Second City; from a love letter to fellow comedian Amy Poehler to a list of prayers for her 5-year-old daughter (“First, Lord: No tattoos. May neither Chinese symbol for truth nor Winnie-the-Pooh holding the FSU logo stain her tender haunches”), Fey gets it so, so, right.  The beauty of the audiobook is that you get every accent, every pause, and every drip of sarcasm so perfectly conveyed.  (As a bonus, all of the pictures of Fey that are included in her book, childhood and otherwise, are included with the audiobook as pdfs on a disc.  Also, the entire recording of Fey and Poehler’s famous skit as Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton.)

As soon as it finished I wanted to start it all over again.  And it made a great Mother’s Day gift!

-Becky