Bossypants

Fey writes that she was “[a] wonderful surprise” to her older parents and that the women in her mother’s office referred to her as a “change-of-life baby” (9). During a kindergarten teacher conference, her parents’ ignorance of the workings of the class reveal to her the fact that she has “old parents” (9). When she holds up a picture she colored for another child to praise, the child rips it up. Thus, she “entered the real world” (10).

While in kindergarten, she is “slashed in the face by a stranger in the alley behind [her] house,” and throughout her life she is “able to tell a lot about people” (10) by the way they react to the resulting scar. One friend’s reaction provides “a fun sociology litmus test” when he asks if “the black guy that did that to you” (10) was ever caught. Others show sympathy in an attempt to make themselves look “brave or sensitive or wonderfully direct” (10). Fey sees through the self-serving comments, stating: “I’m not interested in acting out a TV movie with you where you befriend a girl with a scar” (11).

Adults and kids treat her kindly because of the scar. Later she realizes that “people weren’t making a fuss over me because I was some incredible beauty or genius; they were making a fuss over me to compensate for my being slashed” (11). Fey writes that she has been happy for this “wonderful misunderstanding,” which has helped her live “as if [she] really were extraordinary” (11).

When she is 10 years old, Fey receives from her mother a “my first period” kit with supplies and a cheerful pamphlet called “Growing Up and Liking It” (14). She is then left to learn on her own when her mother “slipped out of the room” (14). She “achieved menarche” at age ten; however, she doesn’t realize at first what has happened because she “knew from commercials that one’s menstrual period was a blue liquid that you poured like laundry detergent into maxi pads” (15).

Years later, at a workshop Fey attends, women are asked “to write down the moment they first ‘knew they were a woman’” (15). Most women write down an instance in which “some dude did something nasty to them” (16). While she herself experiences this “creepery” (16) as young as age 13, she attributes her first feeling like a woman to her purchase of a white denim suit, which she wears to the Senior Awards Night in 1988.

When she is 23, despite that her “whole setup was still factory-new,” Fey visits Planned Parenthood so that she can “be proactive about [her] health like the educated young feminist [she] was” (17). She cracks a joke to the stoic nurse practitioner, then faints when examined with the speculum. The annoyed nurse informs her she has “a short vagina” (18) and sends her home.

At age thirteen, Fey visits Wildwood, New Jersey with her cousins Janet and Lori, who teach her “everything [she] know[s] about womanhood” (19). When Janet criticizes the size of a woman’s hips, Fey learns “that there are an infinite number of things that can be ‘incorrect’ on a woman’s body” (20). From a young age, Fey understands that “[t]he standard of beauty was set” (21) and that it involves blond hair. For this reason, when she reads fairy tales to her daughter, she replaces “blond” with “yellow,” a word more comparable to “brown” (21).

Fey describes how when she was growing up, “beautiful brunettes […] were regarded as a fun, exotic alternative” (22) to blond women. While the popularity of Beyoncé and Jennifer Lopez could have resulted in women “embrac[ing] their diversity and realiz[ing] that all shapes and sizes are beautiful,” in fact it only lengthens “the laundry list of attributes women must have to qualify as beautiful” (22). The list includes contradictory qualities such as “long Swedish legs” and “small Japanese feet” (23).

When she was growing up, one was simply beautiful or not. Those not considered beautiful “could just chill out and learn a trade” (23). Nowadays, however, “if you’re not ‘hot,’ you are expected to work on it until you are” (23). Fey wonders how we can teach our daughters that “they are good enough the way they are” (24) and says she wouldn’t trade any of the “healthy body parts” (24) that make her stand out in a crowd—except her father’s feet.