{alltv} Tina Fey puts on her big-girl 'Bossypants'

It's not every day you read something that makes you laugh out loud every other page. Then again, Tina Fey doesn't write a book every day. Maybe she should.

If you're a fan of the Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock star, famous for her spot-on imitation of Sarah Palin, you will love this collection of autobiographical essays. Even if you're not a die-hard fan, you'll still laugh now and then. You can't help it.

Fey falls into that small category of celebrities you might actually want to know, to have a glass of wine with at the end of the day. People like Nora Ephron. They seem like they would be good friends to have around when you need a laugh. Honest, self-deprecating and, well, funny.

Fey's memoir is called Bossypants because she is a bossypants, something she admits right upfront. (It will surprise no one that the girl has a sassy attitude, an attitude that runs through the book.)

She admits a lot of other things, too — the odd remarks people make about her facial scar (she was slashed by a stranger in the back alley of her Pennsylvania home when she was a kindergartner), that she has had more than her fair share of bad haircuts, that her best friends at summer theater camp were all gay, that her father was a power to contend with. In a good way.

About the book

Bossypants
By Tina Fey
Reagan Arthur, 275 pp., $26.99

The book is a bit frenetic, jumping from one Fey episode to another. Climbing Old Rag Mountain with what she hoped would be a boyfriend. Wrong. Her job at the front desk at a YMCA. Grim. Her honeymoon, a bad start to a good marriage (to Jeff Richmond, a composer and 30 Rock co-producer). She even offers up beauty "tips" and, of course, insider details of her "life" as Palin.

Did Palin help or hurt Ms. Bossypants' career?

"Some may argue that exploiting Governor Palin and her family helped bring attention to my low-rated TV show," Fey writes of 30 Rock, the Emmy-winning NBC sitcom now in its fifth season.

"I am proud to say you are wrong," she writes. "My TV show still enjoys very low ratings. In fact, I think the Palin stuff may have hurt the TV show. Let's face it, between Alec Baldwin and me there is a certain fifty percent of the population who think we are pinko Commie monsters."

Bossy pinko commies, at that.