Bossypants

Fey is intimidated by Michaels at their first meeting, which takes place in 1997 when she interviews for a writer position at Saturday Night Live. She is awestruck giving his name to the security guard and worries about answering his questions perfectly. She writes that she “could have never guessed that in a few years [she]’d be sitting in that office at two, three, four in the morning, thinking, ‘If this meeting doesn’t end soon, I’m going to kill this Canadian bastard’” (111). Ultimately, they develop a close relationship based on mutual respect.

Fey describes Michaels as a mentor. It is Michaels who recommends that Fey “make a ‘development deal’ with NBC and try to come up with a sitcom” (152), a suggestion that leads to the creation of 30 Rock. He also talks to Alec Baldwin about starring in the pilot and soothes NBC executives who worry over the timeline. After thoughtful discussions with Fey, he brings Fey back to Saturday Night Live to play Sarah Palin, and when Fey expresses concerns over the real Sarah Palin joining her in a sketch, he offers solutions that help them avoid the problems Fey envisions.

Fey admires Michaels’s firm but gentle leadership and his “indirect and very effective” manner of dealing with “crazies” (118). She cites an incident in which she has a panic attack and leaves the building; hours later, Michaels calls her at home, suggesting she might be interested in returning for dinner. She writes that “[i]t was the most gentle, non-Bossypants way of saying, ‘You’re embarrassing yourself’” (119). He manages to find “a way for me to slip back in the door like my mental breakdown never happened” (120).

Michaels handles interpersonal relationships with smoothness and finesse and, as Fey writes in “A Childhood Dream, Realized,” he teaches her “a managerial style that was the opposite of Bossypants” (112). He understands that the show must go on when it’s time, not necessarily ready, suggesting that you must not be “too precious about your writing” (112) and that “bombing is painful, but it doesn’t kill you” (113). Michaels’s finesse with the crew is matched only by his finesse with the actual comedy: his edict that they “[n]ever cut to a closed door” illustrates his precise timing and his desire to ensure the audience never sense “a slip in confidence” (116).

Cool, collected, and sharply perceptive, Michaels makes decisions based on what’s best for the show and tends not to suffer from the anxiety that plagues Fey when something could go wrong. He acts not only as a boss but as a mediator and a fixer of problems. Fey carries the lessons he teaches her with her as she moves forward in her career, impacting the way she manages 30 Rock.

Fey meets Poehler at The Second City and observes that she “was tired of being handed dated old blond-girl roles where all her lines were things like ‘Here’s your coffee, honey,’ or ‘Mr. Johnson will see you now,’ or ‘Whattaya mean a blind date?!” (78). Her refusal to conform to roles ascribed to women emerges later when she’s a new cast member at Saturday Night Live. Jimmy Fallon derides her for telling a vulgar story, claiming it’s “not cute” and he doesn’t “like it”; Poehler, to the great pleasure of Fey, responds: “I don’t fucking care if you like it” (129) and returns to her conversation. Fey states of the 2008 election that “the most meaningful moment for women […] was not Governor Palin’s convention speech or Hillary Clinton conceding her 1,896 delegates” but rather “nine-months-pregnant Amy Poehler rapping as Sarah Palin and tearing the roof off the place” (212).

Fighting for years to achieve the same respect as less talented men, Fey feels “less alone” (130) with Poehler, whose fierce self-defenses exemplifies the attitude women should take in the face of condescending men. Fey writes that she thinks of Poehler’s comment to Fallon in many situations in which men make demeaning comments about women; she believes women should go “Over! Under! Through!” (131) such men, leaving sexist conventions in their wake.

In Fey’s first appearance as Sarah Palin, Poehler shares the screen with her as Hillary Clinton. When Fey is preparing to appear as Palin again, she requests to star opposite Poehler, who plays Katie Couric. It’s an example of Fey’s respect for Poehler not only as a friend but as a colleague—a respect that inspires her to subtitle Chapter 15 “One in a series of love letters to Amy Poehler” (129).

Fey discloses in the first paragraph that her mother was 40 years old when Fey was born and that women in her office “referred to her pregnancy as ‘Mrs. Fey and her change-of-life baby’” (9). When at 10 years old Fey tells her mother she wants to shave her legs, her mother gives her a “my first period kit” (14) with supplies and brochures she doesn’t explain. She and Fey’s father, both Republicans, find Fey’s impersonations of Sarah Palin amusing for a time, until a particular sketch involving George W. Bush and John McCain prompts her to tell her daughter that “[i]t’s getting to be too much now” (206). When Fey asks whether she should breastfeed her baby, her mother responds: “Don’t even try it” (216). In the final chapter, Fey describes how her mother, who was fluent in Greek, used to translate messages from teachers to other Greek parents, often softening the messages to protect the kids. Her mother is the star of the last anecdote of the book, in which Fey relates to an overly dramatic little boy who “couldn’t possibly” know that he was “going to be fine” (249).

While her mother does not appear often in the book, the incidents Fey chooses to share are telling. They speak of a typical loving relationship that at times suffers from “a generational difference” (216). Although Fey goes to her mother for advice, the advice she receives does not always apply to her different, less conservative life. However, Fey refers to her mother’s later-in-life pregnancy when considering when to have another baby herself; also, now a mother herself, looking back, she understands why her own mother found the dramatic little boy so funny. Fey’s mother is another example of someone Fey learns from, while ultimately making her own decisions to best lead a life that she herself knows best.

Fey’s father does not figure heavily in her memoir; outside of the chapter devoted to him—the fifth chapter, “That’s Don Fey”—he is mentioned only once, in “30 Rock: An Experiment to Confuse Your Grandparents,” when he is visiting the set the day Fey learns 30 Rock was picked up for the rest of the season. However, the chapter he occupies early in the book—and its early placement in the book, in and of itself—establishes him as a central figure in her life. Her referring to him by his full name helps establish the respect he commands from Fey and others.

Fey writes that “Strong Father Figure/Fear Thereof” is a “key element” in “raising an achievement-oriented, obedient, drug-free, virgin adult” (42). His “stern expression” during Fey’s sixth-grade concert inspires in her “terror burps” (43). He “dresses well,” wears a “garnet college ring,” and “can still rock a hat” (43). In short, he “looks like he’s ‘somebody’” (43); he’s “a badass,” a Korean War veteran, a former Philadelphia firefighter, and “a Goldwater Republican, which is his only option” (45). Fey alludes to their generational differences, writing of the frugality of “Depression” babies (46) and of how people of his generation “cannot be ‘marketed to’” (50).

Interestingly, Fey delivers her description of her father in seemingly minor, offhand anecdotes; for example, she recalls how “[n]eighborhood kids would gather on [their] porch just to listen to him swear at the Phillies game” (45). She also describes the time he left her in the middle of Pathmark to retrieve a shampoo bottle from home. He’d taken her along to return it, and in her haste to join him in his waiting car, she’d grabbed the wrong bottle by mistake. She doesn’t tell his story chronologically but rather through a series of seemingly unrelated everyday details. As a collective, however, these details form a very clear picture of a man who gave her “[t]he gift of anxiety” and “[t]he knowledge that while you are loved, you are not above the law” (50). Her reminiscing in this haphazard manner—her recollection of minor details that coalesce into a whole—feels natural, genuine, and affectionate. She closes the chapter after an anecdote in which Colin Quinn notes that her father “doesn’t fucking play games,” stating: “That’s Don Fey” (51). This succinct closing statement seems to confirm that common storytelling fails to define her father; rather, one must observe him with one’s own eyes to totally understand his formidable character.

Readers’ introduction to Fey’s husband occurs in “My Honeymoon, or A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again Either,” in which Fey describes their unfortunate honeymoon. As he doesn’t like to fly, newlyweds Fey and Richmond take a cruise to Bermuda because it leaves from New York City. On the last night of the cruise, a fire in the engine room forces the ship to return to Bermuda, where the passengers are sent home on flights; beforehand, Fey makes sure to take anti-anxiety medication for him from the infirmary. When they discuss the issue later, Richmond is horrified that Fey says she would have boarded the lifeboat without him. After her complex explanation involving Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie Titanic, he laughs, and the tension evaporates.

Richmond writes the music for 30 Rock, often joining Fey and the writers in their late-night writing sessions. Fey is proud that, under the pressure of the long hours, she “turned to domestic violence only once” (171). Fey appreciates his driving the entire seven hours to his parents’ home for Christmas, as well as a yearly joke he makes as they enter the town.

Meyers is a head writer with Fey on Saturday Night Live and leads the writing of her sketches as Sarah Palin. As they “had written for real impressionists like Darrell Hammond over the years,” they know which “tricks” (188) to use when writing her lines. Part of the reason she isn’t nervous for her first appearance is “that Seth had written a very good sketch” (189). Fey compliments Seth and Poehler for writing a sketch that wasn’t “a dumb catfight between two female candidates” but rather “two women speaking out together against sexism in the campaign”; the sketch was “about feminism,” but viewers “didn’t even realize it because of all the jokes” (197). Meyers goes on to write the sketch in which Fey plays Palin and Poehler plays Katie Couric. He also writes the “sneaker upper” with the real Sarah Palin Fey that Fey at first resists participating in. Meyers’s deftness in writing subtle messages is partly why performing these sketches gives Fey “a pure joy [she] had never experienced before as a performer” (189).