Memoir-able?

Anna Holmes, writing for Newsweek, isn't all that impressed with Tina Fey's new biography, Bossypants.

Holmes is the creator of the Gawker subsidiary website Jezebel (It's a Wikipedia link if you're not a Jezebel or Gawker fan), which tries to emphasize entertainment and showbiz-related news about or of interest to women. Fey's position as one of today's leading female entertainers and the first female head writer of Saturday Night Live makes her memoir of interest to Holmes and to many women, but Holmes says that Fey's choices not to delve too deeply into her life lessen Bossypants' impact as a memoir.

On the one hand, one might also want some more from Fey and sympathize with Holmes at what gets left out, but on the other hand, it's kind of hard to do so. Fey wrote about her own life, and she gets to choose what she tells and doesn't tell. You might say she should be OK with revealing herself since she decided to release a memoir, but she's under no obligation to meet Holmes' or anyone else's expectations about her story.

And it may be that Fey's life isn't that interesting. I don't mean that as a slam. I admit I haven't found her all that funny; SNL's "Weekend Update" under her tenure was about as dismal as it has been post-Curtin/Aykroyd (the Dennis Miller years excepted). She presided over some of the weakest seasons not produced by someone named Doumanian of a franchise that's had a lot of weak seasons. Although Mean Girls displayed wit and fun, Baby Mama and Date Night lacked both and 30 Rock gets most of the few laughs it gives me from Alec Baldwin. But humor's subjective and a lot of people laugh at Fey's work, plus she consistently uses her fame to help a lot of worthy causes, so all that means is I'm not the target audience for her comedy or her book.

By "not that interesting," I mean that Fey seems like a person who goes to work, does her job, raises her family and doesn't seem to be afflicted with the belief that fame equals sainthood, entitles her to be a jerk or makes her somehow more worthwhile as a person than someone who lacks it. She's an ordinary person whose everyday life happens to be lived out in some extraordinary circumstances and that's a situation that often makes for some rather ordinary memoir-ization.

I can't imagine buying Bossypants, although I suppose I'd pick it up if I ran across a copy and had nothing else around I wanted to read -- celebrity memoirs usually disinterest me greatly even when I'm a fan of the celebrity. But either way I'll try not to hold against Ms. Fey that she made the mistake of living and writing about her own life, rather than whatever life I might have preferred she lead.