Acknowledgments
I would like to gratefully thank: Kay Cannon, Richard Dean, Eric Gurian, John Riggi, and Tracy Wigfield for their eyes and ears. Dave Miner for making me do this. Reagan Arthur for teaching me how to do this. Katie Miervaldis for her dedicated service and Latvian demeanor. Tom Ceraulo for his mad computer skills. Michael Donaghy for two years of Sundays.
Jeff and Alice Richmond for their constant loving encouragement and their constant loving interruption, respectively.
Thank you to Lorne Michaels, Marc Graboff, and NBC for allowing us to reprint material.
Contents
Front Cover Image
Welcome
Dedication
Introduction
Origin Story
Growing Up and Liking It
All Girls Must Be Everything
Delaware County Summer Showtime!
That’s Don Fey
Climbing Old Rag Mountain
Young Men’s Christian Association
The Windy City, Full of Meat
My Honeymoon, or A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again Either The Secrets of Mommy’s Beauty
Remembrances of Being Very Very Skinny
Remembrances of Being a Little Bit Fat
A Childhood Dream, Realized
Peeing in Jars with Boys
I Don’t Care If You Like It
Amazing, Gorgeous, Not Like That
Dear Internet
30 Rock: An Experiment to Confuse Your Grandparents
Sarah, Oprah, and Captain Hook, or How to Succeed by Sort of Looking Like Someone There’s a Drunk Midget in My House
A Celebrity’s Guide to Celebrating the Birth of Jesus
Juggle This
The Mother’s Prayer for Its Daughter
What Turning Forty Means to Me
What Should I Do with My Last Five Minutes?
Acknowledgments
Copyright
* Or it would be the biggest understatement since Warren Buffett said, “I can pay for dinner tonight.” Or it would be the biggest understatement since Charlie Sheen said, “I’m gonna have fun this weekend.” So, you have options.
* Improv will not reduce belly fat.
* If you get this reference to David Foster Wallace’s 1997 collection of essays, consider yourself a member of the cultural elite. Why do you hate your country and flag so much?!
* The Viennese do not enjoy American sketch comedy.
* This is a paid endorsement from the Saucony Corporation.
* I say Harvard “Boys” because they are almost always male—but not exclusively; rock on, Amy Ozols!—and because they are usually under twenty-five and have never done physical labor with their arms or legs. I love them very much.
* When I asked Steve Higgins if he remembered the Weekend Update piss jar he said, “Yes, and be sure you mention the booger that had been wiped on the wall and painted over.” So I’m mentioning it.
* Is there such a thing as an all-jerk workplace? Yes. I would flat-out avoid working with Wall Street traders or the women who run the changing rooms at Filene’s Basement.
* Nose thinned. Glasses made less awesome. Grimace inverted. Digital wig swap. Teeth added.
Neckline artificially lowered, no cleavage found. Lawn chair removed and sold at yard sale.
* Not the 102nd most popular television show of all time. The 102nd most popular television show of 2006.
* Actually, that only happened to me once that I know about. A coworker at SNL dropped an angry C-bomb on me and I had the weirdest reaction. To my surprise, I blurted, “No. You don’t get to call me that. My parents love me; I’m not some Adult Child of an Alcoholic that’s going to take that shit.”
And it never happened again… that I know of.
* Although good news gives me angina, I am impervious to bad news. I should be in one of those Oliver Sacks books, because surely I have a rare head injury.
* This is not something I would normally do, but I wanted everything to be perfect for Miss Oprah. Jon Hamm, if you come back, I will not be pre-inspecting your toilet. I may inspect it afterward to make sure you didn’t steal anything.
* See if you can guess what I changed his name to in that chapter.
* It wasn’t the last time, apparently. Also, I am available for parties and corporate events.
* Except for several very satisfying work-related things.
* Apparently Margaret Thatcher is alive and says of course she would have told the nanny directly about the problem and she thinks I am a complete chickenshit.
* I know it’s bullshit that I say “babysitter” instead of nanny. What I have is a full-time nanny, and I should be roundly punished for trying to make it seem like the teenager next door comes over one night a week. But I don’t like the word “nanny.” It gives me class anxiety and race anxiety. And that is why I will henceforth refer to our nanny as our Coordinator of Toddlery.
* These moments include: cleaning poop out of a one-piece bathing suit, getting kicked in the tits by someone who doesn’t want to put on her shoes, Dora the Explorer.
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 by Little Stranger, Inc.
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Reagan Arthur Books/Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com
www.twitter.com/littlebrown
First eBook Edition: April 2011
Reagan Arthur Books is an imprint of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Reagan Arthur Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
Portions of this book have appeared, in slightly different form, in The New Yorker (“What Should I Do with My Last Five Minutes?,” “A Childhood Dream, Realized,” “Peeing in Jars with Boys,” and “I Don’t Care If You Like It”).
The author is grateful for permission to use material from the following: Script excerpts and photographs from 30 Rock courtesy of NBCUniversal. 30 Rock © 2011 NBC Studios, Inc. and ™
Rockefeller Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Script excerpts and photographs from Saturday Night Live courtesy of Broadway Video Enterprises and NBC Studios, Inc. © 2011 NBC Studios, Inc. Distributed by Broadway Video Enterprises.
Photography Credits: pages 6 (top) and 160 (left) © 2008/Mary Ellen Matthews/NBC; pages 6
(bottom) and 229, Alethea McElroy; page 159, Ramona Rosales, courtesy of BUST Magazine; page 160
(right), Ferguson & Katzman Photography/Halo Images; pages 178 and 191 from 30 Rock courtesy of NBCUniversal; page 199 (left) © 2010/Dana Edelson/NBC; page 199 (middle and right) © 2005/Dana Edelson/NBC; pages 208, 218, 220, and 226 © 2008/Dana Edelson/NBC; page 233, Jake Chessum/Time
& Life Pictures/Getty Images.
Baileyd @ Demonoid.me
ISBN: 978-0-3161-7586-9
Table of Contents
Copyright Page
For Jeanne Fey:
Happy Mother’s Day. I made this out of macaroni for you.
Introduction
Welcome Friend,
Congratulations on your purchase of this American-made genuine book. Each component of this book was selected to provide you with maximum book performance, whatever your reading needs may be.
If you are a woman and you bought this book for practical tips on how to make it in a male-dominated
workplace, here they are. No pigtails, no tube tops. Cry sparingly. (Some people say
“Never let them see you cry.” I say, if you’re so mad you could just cry, then cry. It terrifies everyone.) When choosing sexual partners, remember: Talent is not sexually transmittable. Also, don’t eat diet foods in meetings.
Perhaps you’re a parent and you bought this book to learn how to raise an achievement-oriented, drug-free, adult virgin. You’ll find that, too. The essential ingredients, I can tell you up front, are a strong father figure, bad skin, and a child-sized colonial-lady outfit.
Maybe you bought this book because you love Sarah Palin and you want to find reasons to hate me. We’ve got that! I use all kinds of elitist words like “impervious” and “torpor,” and I think gay people are just as good at watching their kids play hockey as straight people.
Maybe it’s seventy years in the future and you found this book in a stack of junk being used to block the entrance of an abandoned Starbucks that is now a feeding station for the alien militia. If that’s the case, I have some questions for you. Such as: “Did we really ruin the environment as much as we thought?” and “Is Glee still a thing?”
If you’re looking for a spiritual allegory in the style of C. S. Lewis, I guess you could piece something together with Lorne Michaels as a symbol for God and my struggles with hair removal as a metaphor for virtue.
Or perhaps you just bought this book to laugh and be entertained. For you, I have included this joke: “Two peanuts were walking down the street, and one was a salted.” You see, I want you to get your money’s worth.
Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am all about money. I mean, just look how well my line of zodiac-inspired toe rings and homeopathic children’s medications are selling on Home Shopping Network. Because I am nothing if not an amazing businesswoman, I researched what kind of content makes for bestselling books. It turns out the answer is “one-night stands,” drug addictions, and recipes.
Here, we are out of luck. But I can offer you lurid tales of anxiety and cowardice.
Why is this book called Bossypants? One, because the name Two and a Half Men was already taken. And two, because ever since I became an executive producer of 30 Rock, people have asked me,
“Is it hard for you, being the boss?” and “Is it uncomfortable for you to be the person in charge?” You know, in that same way they say, “Gosh, Mr. Trump, is it awkward for you to be the boss of all these people?” I can’t answer for Mr. Trump, but in my case it is not. I’ve learned a lot over the past ten years about what it means to be the boss of people. In most cases being a good boss means hiring talented people and then getting out of their way. In other cases, to get the best work out of people you may have to pretend you are not their boss and let them treat someone else like the boss, and then that person whispers to you behind a fake wall and you tell them what to tell the first person. Contrary to what I believed as a little girl, being the boss almost never involves marching around, waving your arms, and chanting, “I am the boss! I am the boss!”
For me this book has been a simple task of retracing my steps to figure out what factors contributed to this person…
developing into this person…
who secretly prefers to be this person.
I hope you enjoy it so much that you also buy a copy for your sister-in-law.
Tina Fey
New York City, 2011
(It’s so hard to believe it’s 2011 already. I’m still writing “Tina Fey, grade 4, room 207” on all my checks!)
Origin Story
My brother is eight years older than I am. I was a big surprise. A wonderful surprise, my mom would be quick to tell you. Although having a baby at forty is a commonplace fool’s errand these days, back in 1970 it was pretty unheard-of. Women around my mom’s office referred to her pregnancy as
“Mrs. Fey and her change-of-life baby.” When I was born I was fussed over and doted on, and my brother has always looked out for me like a third parent.
The day before I started kindergarten, my parents took me to the school to meet the teacher.
My mom had taken my favorite blanket and stitched my initials into it for nap time, just like she’d done for my brother eight years earlier. At the teacher conference my dad tried to give my nap time blanket to the teacher, and she just smiled and said, “Oh, we don’t do that anymore.” That’s when I realized I had old parents. I’ve been worried about them ever since.
While my parents talked to the teacher, I was sent to a table to do coloring. I was introduced to a Greek boy named Alex whose mom was next in line to meet with the teacher. We colored together in silence. I was so used to being praised and encouraged that when I finished my drawing I held it up to show Alex, who immediately ripped it in half. I didn’t have the language to express my feelings then, but my thoughts were something like “Oh, it’s like that, motherfucker? Got it.” Mrs. Fey’s change-of-life baby had entered the real world.
During the spring semester of kindergarten, I was slashed in the face by a stranger in the alley behind my house. Don’t worry. I’m not going to lay out the grisly details for you like a sweeps episode of Dateline. I only bring it up to explain why I’m not going to talk about it.
I’ve always been able to tell a lot about people by whether they ask me about my scar. Most people never ask, but if it comes up naturally somehow and I offer up the story, they are quite interested. Some people are just dumb: “Did a cat scratch you?” God bless. Those sweet dumdums I never mind. Sometimes it is a fun sociology litmus test, like when my friend Ricky asked me, “Did they ever catch the black guy that did that to you?” Hmmm. It was not a black guy, Ricky, and I never said it was.
Then there’s another sort of person who thinks it makes them seem brave or sensitive or wonderfully direct to ask me about it right away. They ask with quiet, feigned empathy, “How did you get your scar?” The grossest move is when they say they’re only curious because “it’s so beautiful.” Ugh.
Disgusting. They might as well walk up and say, “May I be amazing at you?” To these folks let me be clear. I’m not interested in acting out a TV movie with you where you befriend a girl with a scar. An Oscar-y Spielberg movie where I play a mean German with a scar? Yes.
My whole life, people who ask about my scar within one week of knowing me have invariably turned out to be egomaniacs of average intelligence or less. And egomaniacs of average intelligence or less often end up in the field of TV journalism. So, you see, if I tell the whole story here, then I will be
asked about it over and over by the hosts of Access Movietown and Entertainment Forever for the rest of my short-lived career.
But I will tell you this: My scar was a miniature form of celebrity. Kids knew who I was because of it. Lots of people liked to claim they were there when it happened. I was there. I saw it. Crazy Mike did it!
Adults were kind to me because of it. Aunts and family friends gave me Easter candy and oversize Hershey’s Kisses long after I was too old for presents. I was made to feel special.
What should have shut me down and made me feel “less than” ended up giving me an inflated sense of self. It wasn’t until years later, maybe not until I was writing this book, that I realized people weren’t making a fuss over me because I was some incredible beauty or genius; they were making a fuss over me to compensate for my being slashed.
I accepted all the attention at face value and proceeded through life as if I really were extraordinary. I guess what I’m saying is, this has all been a wonderful misunderstanding. And I shall keep these Golden Globes, every last one!
Growing Up and Liking It
At ten I asked my mother if I could start shaving my legs. My dark shin fur was hard to ignore in shorts weather, especially since my best friend Maureen was a pale Irish lass who probably doesn’t have any leg hair to this day. My mom said it was too soon and that I would regret it. But she must have looked at my increasingly hairy and sweaty frame and known that so
mething was brewing.
A few months later, she gave me a box from the Modess company. It was a “my first period” kit and inside were samples of pads and panty liners and two pamphlets. One with the vaguely threatening title “Growing Up and Liking It” and one called “How Shall I Tell My Daughter?” I’m pretty sure she was