MEMOIR: ANN MARIE HOURIHANEreviews Bossypantsby Tina Fey, Sphere, 275pp, £13.99
THE MOST interesting thing about this book is the $6 million (€4 million) Tina Fey was reportedly paid to write it. Fey is a brilliant woman, but that’s the kind of fact that’s hard to top. Luckily for the publishers, however, Fey’s comic voice transfers to print, and her career so far has had its dramatic moment.
A female comedian who had to wear glasses to read the autocue – there is a brief but grisly account of her attempts to put in contact lenses – Fey’s life was changed on August 29th, 2008, when John McCain selected Sarah Palin as his running mate.
What was bad news for the Republican Party was good news for Fey, who was starting the third season of her clever television series, 30 Rock. Fey’s resemblance to Palin – her own husband had pointed it out to her – and her blistering impersonations of the vice-presidential candidate made her a household name across the US. What she was called in a lot of those houses wasn’t that friendly. Unlike Palin herself, who actually appeared with Fey and whose own staff made sure that Fey’s wig and lip colour matched the politician’s, Fey’s parents, both Republicans, eventually got fed up of her needling. “It’s getting to be too much now,” said Mrs Fey.
Jeanne Fey was 40, or perhaps 39, when she gave birth to her daughter, who was referred to, she says, as “Mrs Fey’s Change of Life Baby”. That was the way things were, way back in 1970. Fey was an adored late child. Even her brother, who was eight years older, “looked out for me like a third parent”. Yet we never, as far as I can see in this strange book, learn her brother’s name.
In this small Philadelphia family, and particularly in her relationship with her handsome, well dressed and pretty cool dad, a veteran of the Korean War and a former fireman, lie the roots of Fey’s comedy. You don’t have to work your way to the chapter on 30 Rock (page 169) to divine that her character’s sparring partner on the show, Jack Donaghy, who is played by Alec Baldwin and is a handsome, well dressed and pretty cool boss, bears a striking resemblance to Don Fey. Donaghy is also a Republican. In fact he’s so Republican that he refers to “Rainstorm Katrina”.
Donaghy is, of course, Irish – Boston Irish. He has a nightmare of an Irish mother, Coleen, who is played by Elaine Stritch. I have a friend who says the best chemistry in the show is between Stritch and Baldwin. “What kind of mother,” asks Donaghy, “tells her son that John Kennedy died because he talked in church?”
In fact Fey and her writing team (and Baldwin, some of us suspect) have the Irish nailed pretty good. Several of Fey’s childhood friends were Irish Catholics. “They’re Boston Irish Catholic, they mate for life,” says Donaghy. “Like swans – drunk, angry swans.”
Baldwin met Fey on Saturday Night Live, where she worked mainly as a writer for nine years. Baldwin was (or maybe still is) one of the show's most frequent hosts, and a well known liberal. Fey, according to herself, was learning from the show's presiding patriarch, Lorne Michaels, who, although Fey does not say so here, is obviously another model for Donaghy, who is a television boss.
Donaghy is a fabulous creation. Baldwin manages to be both fat and hot at the same time. (It’s difficult to write about him without sounding like Donaghy yourself.) His world view is refreshingly simple: “Don’t ever make me talk to a woman of that age again.”
This book, in contrast, is surprisingly complicated, as Fey tries to protect her privacy by over-sharing intimate detail – a classic technique of a female celebrity. Do we really need to know that she got her first period at 10 while in a choir singing Song Sung Blue?
Fey is uninhibited, gynaecologically speaking. A cautious girl, at the age of 23, she goes for a cervical smear. And faints. Twice. “The nurse said, ‘You have a short vagina. I think I hit you in the cervix’.”
Tina, please. I don’t mind the child birth report – “epidural, vaginal delivery, did not poop on the table” – but the short vagina stuff I could live without, especially when you don’t even tell us when your birthday is. (Yes, I will google it.)
I am interested in people’s honeymoon stories, but not really in the details of what the couple wore to formal night on their honeymoon cruise. Fey is much funnier when describing what it’s like being pulled about and insulted on photo shoots with the most famous photographers in the world “like Mario Testino, who once told me, ‘Lift your chin, darling, you are not eighteen’.”
Her time with the Second City improvisation company involved a lot of touring. “Corporate gigs at eight am for employees who were there to be told about reductions in their health care benefits.”
The only time Fey gets revelatory, interestingly enough, is about being a working mother. She is currently pregnant with her second child but when 30 Rockwas commissioned she had an eight-month-old baby. The guilt of working a 70-hour week, the exhaustion, her agonies about tackling the nanny, her tri-annual cries at work, this is distressing reading.
On the plus side, Fey probably wrote – or dictated – this book herself. On the minus side, you don’t learn much about her and the photos, vital in a book of this sort, are so badly reproduced as to be indecipherable. Who cares? We have the box sets.
ANN MARIE HOURIHANEis an Irish Timescolumnist
