Erik Anderson
In One Note, Gabriel Blackwell asks writers to talk about the book they are currently reading and why. One Note 016: Erik Anderson, Tina Fey, Bossypants.
In One Note, I ask writers for just that: one note, a single paragraph, on what they’re reading right now.
Today’s note comes courtesy of Erik Anderson:
I thought I’d given up on celebrity memoirs after I failed to finish reading, almost twenty years ago, Leslie Nielsen’s The Naked Truth, and yet here I am reading Tina Fey’s Bossypants because, well, why not? Besides, my local library’s copy of Hal Needham’s Stuntman!: My Car-Crashing, Plane-Jumping, Bone-Breaking, Death-Defying Hollywood Life was recently shredded (or so the woman at the reference desk told me) by a pit bull.
I never miss 30 Rock. Fey’s humor is topical in a way most television never dares to be. She’s smart as hell, and I laugh like a fool through each episode, as my wife can attest (the third season’s “Generalissimo” episode, in which Alec Baldwin also plays a telenovella villain, is a particular favorite). None of which is to say that reading Bossypants is like watching an episode of 30 Rock, even if Fey’s voice in the book reads, at times, like a version of her voice on the show. The best thing about the book so far—I’m halfway through it—is the way Fey appraises her own life and the characters in it. Her chapter on her father, for instance, “That’s Don Fey,” alternately skewers and celebrates him. She’s equally ruthless with herself when she deserves it, which is probably what makes the book’s best (and most surprising) insights as sharp as they are. Is it great writing? Probably not, but it’s perceptive and funny and entertaining, and sometimes, to paraphrase a passage about Fey’s honeymoon cruise, it’s better not to overthink it.
Erik Anderson’s The Poetics of Trespass was published by Otis Books/Seismicity Editions in 2010.
