Posted by I love all of Amy’s characters, and like so many other people she came to my attention when she starred on Parks and Rec as Leslie Knope. I related so hard to her character. Leslie and her need to over-work herself, bite off projects that are too big, and attempt to accomplish 10,000 different things at one time. I’ve calmed down a bit in my mid 30s, but back in my 20s I was high fucking strung, lol. From interviews I know that she has a somewhat similar personality to her character and I was interested to see how strong the parallels really were. Not to mention the audiobook had Patrick Stewart credited so I had to figure out how he worked into this whole thing.
Turns out that Patrick Stewart and a number of other people make cameo appearances in the book acting as her “inner thoughts” or reading titles to chapters, that sort of thing. There are a few people she sits and talks with briefly in an interview type style. I honestly think the cameos and getting Patrick Stewart to say the things he did was the best part of the book for me, lol.
This book had a full summary of her life starting with her elementary school years and her parents background, going through to high school and college and all that. I found a lot of that to be fairly boring, I was far more interested in her career. Thankfully, that didn’t take too long to get to, she went over her younger years fairly briefly and also interspersed it with other things so it wasn’t just one long summary of birth to college.
She touched on who inspired her and who gives her creative juices and one of them is Carol Burnett, and a quote I pulled was “good comedy can be fun, you don’t have to treat people badly to be on top” and I love that.
Honestly there were a fair number of quotable pieces in here. Some would call them obvious and they’d be right. But, sometimes we need to obvious stated because we’re so busy with our heads in the sand. “Women should tell themselves that over and over again. Good for her, but not for me” — I also love this message that women should support each other regardless of our life choices. Stay at home mom? Great! “Good for you, not for me” allows you to celebrate others choices, support them, while also doing your own thing that makes you happy.
There were a few surprising things she talked about in here and let me tell you – do not let Amy Poehler in your house unsupervised. She admitted that she goes through everything. She will go through a new dates phone, she will go through her babysitters phone, when she was a kid she would rifle through every drawer of the house she was babysitting for. Holy shit, woman. Respect people’s stuff. Wtf. She said she’s “not proud of it” but you’re a grown ass woman, control yourself.
I love that she shares really embarrassing and genuine flaws that most people wouldn’t share. Like the invasion of people’s privacy. I wouldn’t ay she revealed any deep dark secrets, but she didn’t try to paint herself as a flawless success, either. She admitted to drinking and driving while also strongly condemning it and saying she thinks about all the beautiful families she passed in her car that she could have killed with her stupidity. Takes a lot to admit you did something so shitty. Those biographies are such a drag since they’re so clearly full of shit.
Another quote of hers, “you have to care about your work, but not about the result. You have to care about how good you are and how you feel, but not about good people think you are or how people think you look.” She deals a lot with body image and continuously says things like she doesn’t have a symmetrical face, and she’s not pretty etc. I dunno, I wouldn’t say she’s stunning but she’s not ugly at all. She does acknowledge that this is a little silly coming from someone in Hollywood, but she’s right in that just because you’re famous doesn’t mean you’ll be spared from anxieties and insecurities.
She’s certainly got a lot of very strong opinions and she’s very vocal about them — clearly, as this is a book about herself. You’re either going to really like this or not at all depending on where you are relative to her opinions lol. I found myself very hit or miss with how she felt about things, but at least its earnest and funny.
Final Score: 80/100