I've been waiting to read Yes Please by Amy Poehler aaaaaaall year, and I was not disappointed. Yes Please feels very organic, feels very much like Amy is just chatting with you over a glass of wine on your couch, trying not to spill as she makes you laugh and laugh with nonchalant, raw stories from her life. I have long been a fan of Amy Poehler and her writing, and I believe her to be one of the great comedians of our time. She is a strong, able, successful woman who created a strong, able, successful woman TV persona in addition to getting her name in the writing credits of countless shorts and episodes and scripts. She created an amazing vlog endeavor called "Smart Girls At The Party" with Meredith Walker and Amy Miles that has set up a precedent for empowering media material for young women, answering questions and just generally being a killer role model. The inside flap describes her "hilarious and candid book" as a "collection of stories, thoughts, ideas, lists, and haikus from the mind of one of our most beloved entertainers," and I think that is a more than apt description. Yes Please could easily be called either a memoir or a collection of essays, and Poehler brings elements of both into her finished work. Printed on glossy paper to highlight all the pictures and mementos included, Yes Please is a heavy book, but the heaviness does not extend to her prose style or her overall tone. Poehler is easy with her storytelling, describing a past that sometimes makes you double-take and skirting certain, more private issues with panache.
There is certainly a degree of "bandwagon fever," (as tinges anything in a successful genre these days,) coming quickly on the heels of books like Bossypants by Tina Fey, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me by Mindy Kaling, Girl Walks Into A Bar by Rachel Dratch, Not That Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham, and others, but Poehler definitely has her own way of doing things. Her voice is definitively different from these other hilarious ladies, and she admits to having read a number of the aforementioned texts during her writing process for this book. She includes pictures and lists from her childhood, sections written by her parents, a chapter penned by good friend and fellow writer-actor Seth Myers, and many other deviations from the standard memoir format. To be fair, Poehler herself is a deviation from the standard format, and it only makes sense that her own book about her life would follow her lead.
I think it would be extraordinarily difficult to pinpoint one singular part of this book that I liked more than the rest, but there were a number of sections that were more interesting to me. I particularly enjoyed Poehler's descriptions of how she got into comedy and improv, on both the Chicago scene and the New York one. Her chapters devoted to SNL and Parks and Rec were thrilling, and more than ever do I want to be able to write like this woman does and do things like this woman does. There were definitely a few lines that spoke to me more than others did, like this following little passage:
"Everyone lies about writing [...] No one tells the truth about writing a book. Authors pretend their stories were always shiny and perfect and just waiting to be written. The truth is, writing is this: hard and boring and occasionally great but usually not." (p.x)
This. This is beautiful. Poehler constantly keeps it real without making a big deal about it. She is honest and humble and unassuming and she talks about hard work as an expected and welcomed part of life. I was reading this book in November, which much of the writing world knows as NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, where one attempts to put down 50,000+ words in 30 days or less. This was the first year I'd actually completed it, or "won," and it felt sublime. However, my other writing (read: this blog) seems to have fallen by the wayside over the year and as almost a hangover from NaNo and all the technical writing I do at work all day. My boyfriend pointed this out to me recently, and it sort of took me aback: I hadn't quite realized how much my own personal writing had taken a backseat until I looked at the summary of this year vs. last year's blog, and I've only written about half the posts I did last year. I guess what I'm trying to say is, Amy gets it. Writing is hard. I've let myself get away with far too much the past year and this book reminded me that I needed to get back.
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