Book Review: Bossypants – Tina Fey

Published: 2011
Format: Audio (Narrated by Tina Fey)
Read: August 2021

Oh, man. So I read this recently and I needed to get some stuff off my chest. As a warning: this is angry. I did not like this book at all. If you already really like Tina Fey, and I guess, to be fair, that is who this is aimed at, maybe you did like this, or maybe you will. But I cannot help thinking what a dreadful, painful waste of time it was for me.

Let me explain myself. I picked this up as a Daily Deal on Audible because it was cheap and I have occasionally enjoyed Fey’s work — mostly Mean Girls and the, in my opinion, underrated comedy This Is Where I Leave You (2014). It’s pretty short and I was interested in what it was like be the first female head writer on Saturday Night Live. What the hell, right?

Wrong. Tina Fey, as she presents herself in this book, is very much a white, upper-middle-class feminist. I don’t often love these people. I should state for the record that I am white and a feminist but I don’t believe in her particular brand. I know this in part because when I was younger, I shared some of the ideas that she conveys in her book, but I grew up, began to read and listen to other voices — an ongoing process — and have tried to unlearn a lot of this nonsense.

It didn’t start off so bad, I enjoyed her narration and some of her early discussions about the frustration with the normalization of men’s harassment of women in society and of holding herself accountable for early bouts of homophobia in her teen years.

She first lost me though when she implied that women like Beyoncé and Jennifer Lopez made beauty standards harder for women as if the beauty industry has ever actively promoted the beauty of women of colour as the standard and made white women feel like they needed to conform to this.

From there it all went downhill. I felt like she often said wildly problematic things as though they were hilarious. For instance, she tells us that her Dad was just from a different time by assuming that the black boys coming around the corner on one bike were coming to steal theirs. That he was just ignorant of the socio-economic issues around why these boys might be out and about in the middle of the afternoon on only one bike. But really by the time you’ve thought about that they’ve already stolen the bike. Get it? Because the black boys actually were little criminals? So funny.

It also did not take her long to hit upon my absolute pet peeve and the biggest hint to me that your feminism doesn’t extend very far beyond yourself, that is, jokes about Sally Hemings.

As part of her discussion about only liking white guys, she makes a joke about Thomas Jefferson being a perfect example of the kind of man she would like (all of this already gross). She laments that she herself was not white enough to be conventionally attractive to the white boys she liked — having the darker features of her Mediterranean heritage — but not dark enough to be considered exotic (I don’t doubt that’s how white boys think but to include it uncritically is also gross). Even Thomas Jefferson, she jokes, wanted only either end of the spectrum, his white wife and Sally Hemings.

I’ve got to be honest, I put the book down and left it for a day after that. Sally Hemings has been the butt of jokes forever (including in the definitely super progressive Hamilton). It betrays to me a particularly lazy, it’s-easier-to-punch-down kind of humour. It’s offensive and it deliberately ignores that regardless of anything else, she was his slave. He owned her. Nothing about that is funny to me. Sorry if that makes me a killjoy.

Into this group of shitty jokes that ignore the ways that men abuse power by making jokes about vulnerable women instead, I also put cheap shots at Monica Lewinsky. It didn’t take long before those appeared either. By this point, I wasn’t sure why I was still bothering.

I had hoped that I would get to hear about how she came to make Mean Girls and what that was like (there is almost none of this) or about her time on SNL. Instead, I got a diatribe against women who do skincare, or like makeup — because Tina isn’t like other girls — and a series of racist jokes about nail salons that astounded me. I understand this was 2011 but even in those dark ages people could still be hurt by racism. Wild, I know.

Perhaps this isn’t news to some of you but I want to note that I have never watched 30 Rock, a show that she admits has been speculated to be the most racist show on TV — she says it’s not, by the way, she thinks it’s actually the NFL because they always portray black people as rapists and murderers, a joke I sincerely hope she regrets putting to print.

I just didn’t expect it to be so bad. No one is safe in this book — she is racist, ableist (there is the use of the R-slur), and it often feels like she is still working on some internalised misogyny. I despised almost every minute of it.

I wonder how much of this comes from the fact that this reads very much like a series of sketches. Instead of writing a sincere and interesting book that addresses her life and feelings — which could still be done in a funny way — she has boiled them all down to skits and one-liners that rely on very tired, offensive jokes.

I will say that there were some glimmers of hope. I liked her discussion about being a working mum and her struggle with the decision about whether or not to have another child because of the impact it might have on her career. That felt very honest.

I also liked her stories about Amy Poehler. She tells one in particular about a time where Jimmy Fallon told Amy to stop a rather gross bit she was doing by putting on a whiny voice and saying he didn’t like it. Amy simply replied ‘I don’t fucking care if you don’t like it.’ I like that energy.

And maybe that is the energy from this book, she doesn’t fucking care what people think. And if you liked it, fine. But here’s the thing, if what you say deliberately punches down and hurts people — carelessly or not, whether you meant it or not — maybe you should care.

And again, this was 2011, a lot has happened, maybe she’s changed her approach to some things. I try to be hopeful. But still.

I don’t like saying it about books — I’ve never written one, it’s an accomplishment to do — but I had such a bad time with this. It’s terrible and I would highly encourage you to skip it. Unless you’re a die-hard fan in which case, I would encourage you to read more widely anyway.