Bossypants

I read Tina Fey’s book on the plane back from Mississippi. Perfect plane reading. As everyone says, it is extremely funny, with sudden injections of glorious vulgarity. That we would expect, given her screen credentials. But what struck me more were its respect for intelligence and its moral acuity. So I recommend it as a textbook for right thinking. It opens with a discussion of how people react to the scar on her face, delivered  when she was a child by a man who intentionally slashed her. It makes you shudder to think you might fall into one of her categories. And it brings a streak of tragedy into the humor that follows. Her feminism sounds all the right notes, to my mind. I could quote many lines from the book but here is one I particularly liked, from the chapter “The Mother’s Prayer for Its Daughter”: “O Lord, break the Internet forever, that she may be spared the misspelled invective of her peers”. Amen to that, Tina. Also fascinating: how she created 30 Rock and got on SNL. Funny, yes, but also shrewd and honest–the scar behind the joke. It reminds me: I have never known a humorless original mind.