61 pages • 2 hours read
Tina FeyBossypants
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “The Secrets of Mommy’s Beauty”
Sardonically remarking that readers bought her book to learn about her beauty regimen, Fey shares her "Twelve Tenets of Looking Amazing Forever," which turn traditional beauty tips on their heads. For example, under “Form Good Beauty Habits Early,” Fey shares that as a child, she stood “in front of [the] giant air conditioner and let it blast [her] hair dry” (95). Under “The Right Undergarments Are an Essential Part of Your Silhouette,” she describes the time her mother took her to JCPenney and made her try a bra on over her clothes. “Skin Care, Skin Care, Skin Care!” contains a plethora of increasingly complex acronyms, concluding with her description of the teenage pimple-popping routine that constituted her “rigorous daily massage” (96). “Space Lasers” suggests that “[a]s you age, you may want to pay someone to shoot lasers at your face” (97), while her eighth tip discusses how she found the post-high school hair style that “let people see the real me that was inside—a mother of four who was somehow also a virgin” (98). Next, in “When It Comes to Fashion, Find What Works for You and Stick with It,” Fey explains how she solidified her look at age 19: “[o]versize T-shirts, bike shorts, and wrestling shoes” (101), complete with a fanny pack “[t]o prevent the silhouette from being too baggy” (102). In “A Manicure Is a Must,” she muses on the typical nail salon in New York City, in which you “[s]it in an enclosed space full of fumes and hold hands with a stranger for twenty minutes while everyone around you speaks a language you don’t understand” (103). The 11th tip focuses on how “your late thirties and forties are about fighting back decay” (104). Finally, the 12th tip, “The Most Important Rule of Beauty,” is simply: “Who cares?” (104).
Chapter 11 Summary: “Remembrances of Being Very Very Skinny”
Fey’s “Remembrances of Being Very Very Skinny” involve being “cold all the time” (105), eating health food cookies, resenting newfound attention from men, bony knees, feeling “wonderfully superior” (106), and not having kids.
At the end of the chapter, Fey writes that “[w]e should leave people alone about their weight” (106). Being “skinny for a while,” she writes, “is a perfectly fine pastime” that everyone should try once, “like a super-short haircut” (106).
Chapter 12 Summary: “Remembrances of Being a Little Bit Fat”
Fey’s “Remembrances of Being a Little Bit Fat” include eating fast food, wearing men’s overalls, resenting male friends who didn’t want to date her, and being a “real woman” (108). She also remarks that “[her] boobs were bigger” (107).
At the end of the chapter, Fey again writes that “[w]e should leave people alone about their weight” because being “chubby for a while is a natural phase of life and nothing to be ashamed of. Like puberty or slowly turning into a Republican” (108).
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
In “The Secrets of Mommy’s Beauty,” with her typical sarcastic, self-deprecating humor, Fey continues to riff on the “impossible ideal” (24) of women’s beauty by drawing attention to the impracticality of beauty routines that supposedly help women achieve it. Like the period-related conversations in the “Growing Up and Liking It” brochure, the process by which women are supposed to achieve conventional beauty is unrealistic. While many items on her list are introduced with a heading lauding a conventional beauty tip—“Skin Care, Skin Care, Skin Care!” or “A Manicure is a Must”—the tips themselves depict the unglamorous realities of everyday women. Even the title itself—"Twelve Tenets of Looking Amazing Forever"—is an overblown promise. Just as “Growing Up and Liking It” idealizes menstruation, thus negating the realities of women’s bodies, typical beauty tips, Fey suggests, apply only to society’s ideal delicate, flower-like woman. What’s more, these beauty tips seem to expect women to spend unlimited time tending to their looks. The stereotype of the vapid woman is perpetuated by the producers of The Second City, who evidently do not believe that when it comes to intellectual contributions, their female cast members are as valuable as men.
Interestingly, as she describes in Chapter 12, “Remembrances of Being Very Very Skinny,” Fey has had a taste of achieving the ideal, and it was, by her account, miserable. By ending both “Remembrances” chapters with the same statement—“We should leave people alone about their weight” (106, 108)—Fey draws attention to the fact that women are criticized both for being skinny and curvy, and that each comes with its own unique challenges. It’s a message reminiscent of the narrow but contradictory standards of “All Girls Must Be Everything,” in which Fey writes that whereas when she was growing up, convention held that beautiful women had “[s]mall eyes, toothy smile, boobies, no buttocks, [and] yellow hair” (21), nowadays, “Yellowhairs who were once on top” desperately work out at the gym “to reverse-engineer a butt” (23). The impossibility of satisfying all demands is just one more reason women should disregard the criticism.
Fey frequently suggests that she grew up as an awkward child who, with her curvier body, dark hair, and less fashionable dress, struggled to fit in with those around her. This, combined with her unapologetic discussion of her success, seems to suggest that conventional beauty tips are arbitrary and unimportant. She has realized her dreams despite her deviation from convention, or perhaps because of it. In a world in which women have to be everything at once, one must, she argues, throw up one’s hands and be oneself.
