Audiobook Review: Bossypants

Bossypants

Author: Tina Fey
Narrator: Tina Fey
Duration: 5 hrs, 35 mins
Publisher: Hachette Audio
Source: Library

Description from Goodreads:
Before Liz Lemon, before "Weekend Update," before "Sarah Palin," Tina Fey was just a young girl with a dream: a recurring stress dream that she was being chased through a local airport by her middle-school gym teacher. She also had a dream that one day she would be a comedian on TV.

She has seen both these dreams come true.

At last, Tina Fey's story can be told. From her youthful days as a vicious nerd to her tour of duty on Saturday Night Live; from her passionately halfhearted pursuit of physical beauty to her life as a mother eating things off the floor; from her one-sided college romance to her nearly fatal honeymoon—from the beginning of this paragraph to this final sentence.

Tina Fey reveals all, and proves what we've all suspected: you're no one until someone calls you bossy.

Review:

Tina Fey's Bossypants pretty much swept every category it was part of in the Audie Awards. As such, I had pretty incredibly high expectations, only made higher by my immense respect for Tina Fey. I love 30 Rock and think she's hilarious. Imagine my disappointment to find that I really feel meh about her audiobook, even though I got to listen to her reading it to me.

Basically, I just didn't find this particularly funny, even though it's clearly intended to be. The funniest part was probably one of the included SNL sketches. I maybe laughed out loud once or twice. Two of the five discs not only didn't made me laugh, but irritated me. I guess it felt a bit like Fey was trying too hard, and the end result wasn't funny.

Bossypants would have benefited from more of a distinct narrative ARC. Despite the title, it's not really about leadership or work, though it pretends to be. It's more like an overview of chapters of Tina Fey's life. When she switches from one topic to another, there is no transition. It's just BOOM we're talking about this now. It's very distracting and uneven. The topics basically break down like this:

Disc 1: Scenes from Tina's Youth
Disc 2: Improv
Disc 3: SNL
Disc 4: 30 Rock
Disc 5: Babies

Learning more about the inner works of the entertainment industry interested me, so the middle of the audiobook was enjoyable enough. That last disc basically made me want to hurl the audiobook out the window, but then I would have had to pay the library for it, and that shit's expensive. I kid you not that the ENTIRE last disc was about babies and breast milk. If you made a list of things that I have no interest in those would be near the top with football and hearing about old people's medical problems.

Keeping this short, rather than being a bigger Tina Fey fan at the end of this audiobook, I'm less interested in her than I was. Tons of people have loved this, though, so who knows. Maybe if you'd not placed Tina Fey on a nerd goddess pedestal it's better.

Rating: 2.5/5