Bossypants

Bossypants is a humorous memoir published in 2011 by actor and writer Tina Fey. Fey describes growing up as an awkward, smart-mouthed girl and traces the process by which she enters show business, from working at a theater summer camp, to taking night improv classes, to writing for Saturday Night Live, and finally to creating her own television sitcom, 30 Rock. Fey writes of the discrimination and double standards to which women in show business are subjected and suggests that they are a product of impossible, sometimes contradictory ideals placed on women by society at large. In order to rise in show business, she argues, women must overcome the urge to surrender to convention and to please an implacable public.

Fey’s mother is forty years old when Fey is born, and Fey learns at a young at that her parents are older. When she’s in kindergarten, her face is slashed by a stranger in an alley behind her house. She carries the scar to this day, and she believes she can tell a lot about people by the way they react to it. As she enters her teens, she begins to realize that women are judged for their bodies and that no body, no matter how conventionally beautiful, seems capable of satisfying the ideal.