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I really don’t know why Tina Fey felt she needed to write a memoir. Perhaps it’s because this is the last season of “30 Rock” (I hope; I really can’t imagine the show without Alec Baldwin), and she wanted to try her hand at writing … something not television/movie related. That said, it’s a good book. She goes pretty much chronologically through her life: from a childhood in West Philadelphia, to college at the University of Virginia, to her time in Chicago with Second City, to her years at “Saturday Night Live,” to “30 Rock.” In there, she fits her marriage and birth of her first child as well.
Like most comedy, it’s uneven. Some parts are horribly hilarious (like her Doomed Honeymoon); in some parts she just lectures (about sexism in politics, for example) and the jokes fall flat (but perhaps they were meant to). That said, it was entertaining enough — Fey’s self-deprecating style is really pretty funny — to keep me sitting in the car listening long after I had gotten to where I was going. My favorite sections were about the development and production of “30 Rock,” perhaps because I’ve been a fan of the show since it started. But I found that’s where the biggest laughs were for me.
A note on the audiobook: on the one hand, I really enjoyed hearing Fey read her book. She did voices (her Alec Baldwin is really quite good), and we got the audio clip of her first Sarah Palin “Saturday Night Live.” She did mumble on occasion, which bugged me until I checked the print version and realized that she was mumbling the asides. But she kept saying “check the pdf for this picture. Really. You won’t regret it.” I never did. I listen to the books in the car, and I’m not going to take the CDs out just so I can look at a picture. I did, however, check them out in the print edition. And they were, as she promised, quite hilarious.
So would I recommend the audio book for this one? Well, yes… if you’re like me and willing to check out the print edition for the extra laughs. Either way, it’s good for some laughs, which is worth the price of the book.
Rated: High for profanity. I stopped counting the f-bombs.
