‘Bossypants’ by Tina Fey
When I was thirteen years old I went to see a film called Mean Girls. In buying a pair of jeans from Topshop one day I had also unknowingly secured a pair of tickets to a preview screening of said film and, therefore, I got to see it before anybody else. Wahoo! I never did wear those jeans, not even once, but the free cinema tickets were certainly worth whatever they cost…sorry mother. Now I remember seeing posters for Mean Girls and being most unenthused. I don’t know if it was the graduated pink-to-purple background, or the fact that Lindsay Lohan (who I had just seen sing and dance her way through the appallingly bad Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen) was the lead, but something about the film’s promo material just wasn’t doing it for me. Alas, my thirteen-year-old self could not have been more wrong: Mean Girls turned out to be a gut-bustingly funny Paramount comedy, and it has become to the ‘00s what Clueless was to the '90s and Heathers to the '80s, a teen movie both genre-defining and genre-defying. Yes, it is possible.
Anyway, I mention Mean Girls as it would be none of these things without Tina Fey. On top of playing Lohan’s harassed calculus teacher, Ms Norbury, Fey single-handedly wrote the film’s screenplay. Which, as any ardent Mean Girls fan will tell you, is really the best thing about the film. After all, where would we be without such gems as 'boo, you whore’ and 'too gay to function’? In a way, quoting from Mean Girls is a lot like having your own endangered language - I have friends to whom I could say 'I’ve been really busy with choir’ without them thinking that I had actually joined a choir. Nor is it uncommon to hear 'four for you Glen Coco, you go Glen Coco!’ shouted across an otherwise sedate room. But, incredible though Tina Fey’s work on Mean Girls may be, it is not what I came here to discuss. The work in question is Bossypants, Fey’s bestselling memoir which was published in 2011.
From start to finish, Bossypants is a riot. I normally only visit the biography department in Waterstone’s when I feel the need to dream up more appropriate titles for insipid celebrity autobiographies - for example, Cheryl would be How to Sucker Punch a Toilet Attendant and Become the Nation’s Sweetheart in the Process - but with Tina Fey there was little need for this dubious pastime of mine. I took one look at the blurb for Bossypants and knew that my bookshelf-cum-digital piano would be completely bereft without it. From her accounts of growing up in Pennsylvania to her experiences impersonating Governor Sarah Palin - 'I can see Russia from my house!’ - everything Fey talks about is imbued with her unique brand of wit: wry and risqué, but always warm and inherently human at base. Furthermore, Bossypants is one of those books that hooks you in so well that fifty, sixty pages just disappear before your eyes and you’re asking 'well hell, where did they go?!’ Even if you are not familiar with Fey’s previous work, even if you loathed Mean Girls and have never seen a single episode of 30 Rock, I still implore you to check out Bossypants, for Fey covers some diverse and surprising territory.
This piece was originally published on alisonlaurabell.tumblr.com in December 2012.