“Bossy Pants” by Tina Fey

While perusing for something worth reading during the recent rainy days, I found Tina Fey’s “Bossypants.”

I proceeded to devour this book for the next two hours. I ignored my family, friends, e-mails and obligations to read, stopping only occasionally to laugh out loud and yell to the other people in my house about how much I adored Tina and how badly I wanted to be her. I call this experience the “Fey-gasm.”

The book is a memoir written in her hysterical style and voice. When I say you’re going to laugh out loud, I mean you’re going to laugh out loud, clutch the book to your chest and let out a hearty, guttural and unattractive guffaw. It’ll be great; just don’t read it in public.

I wasn’t sold on the book until I read the chapter called “A Supposedly Fun Thing I‘ll Never Do Again” about her cruise-ship honeymoon. The title pays homage to the David Foster Wallace essay of the same name about his time on a cruise ship. To have a Tina Fey chapter with a David Foster Wallace reference was enough to make my heart beat wildly and my internal organs swell. Fey talks about her husband and how, if your cruise ship is about to go down, the performers and waiters are the ones in charge of your lives in the lifeboats. They can shoot you if you’re disruptive or make things difficult in accordance to nautical law; I kid you not.

Another golden moment is when Fey addresses her haters. Plenty of people go on the internet daily and leave highly negative comments about her. According to the book, one commenter wrote that she was “an ugly, pear-shaped, bitchy, overrated troll,” to which she replied that “to say [she is] an overrated troll, when you have never even seen [her] guard a bridge, is patently unfair” and then she calls the commenter’s penis small. She’s wonderful.

What Tina Fey does best is not forgetting what a marvel her being in the business of comedy is. She is a modern feminist who understands how difficult it is to be a woman and become a big name in comedy. She knows she came in as the underdog but, somehow, with her hard work and talent, she ended
up on top.