Yes Please - Amy Poehler

Date Started: Sometime in March 2015
Date Finished: Approximately 7-10 days later

Here's the book blurb:

Do you want to get to know the woman we first came to love on Comedy Central's Upright Citizens Brigade? Do you want to spend some time with the lady who made you howl with laughter on Saturday Night Live, and in movies like Baby Mama, Blades of Glory, and They Came Together? Do you find yourself daydreaming about hanging out with the actor behind the brilliant Leslie Knope on Parks and Recreation? Did you wish you were in the audience at the last two Golden Globes ceremonies, so you could bask in the hilarity of Amy's one-liners?

If your answer to these questions is "Yes Please!" then you are in luck. In her first book, one of our most beloved funny folk delivers a smart, pointed, and ultimately inspirational read. Full of the comedic skill that makes us all love Amy, Yes Please is a rich and varied collection of stories, lists, poetry (Plastic Surgery Haiku, to be specific), photographs, mantras and advice. With chapters like "Treat Your Career Like a Bad Boyfriend," "Plain Girl Versus the Demon" and "The Robots Will Kill Us All" Yes Please will make you think as much as it will make you laugh. Honest, personal, real, and righteous, Yes Please is full of words to live by.

And here are my thoughts...

And so concludes my efforts to read all of the books by major women comics (see previous entries on Tina Fey's book and Mindy Kaling's book). Let me say, for the record, my favorite was Mindy's. I just found her so much more relatable and her writing didn't feel forced. But we've already reviewed that book, so let's move on to this one.

This is a fun book. I'd recommend it, no question. Amy is honest about personal elements of her life (like the birth of her children and feelings about divorce) and I enjoyed "getting to know her" through this book. That said, the danger in reading a book like this is that you truly "get to know" the person behind the comic - which can be quite different from what you see on TV. Here, I'm referencing Amy's character on Parks and Recreation (side note: amazing show) - who is much more, well, innocent (maybe not exactly the right word here, but you get my idea). Suffice to say that I didn't really enjoy reading the chapter on sex in this book, nor did I really need to read about how men need to "eat pussy" and picture it coming from Leslie Knope. It's just a disconnect for me that I didn't particularly enjoy. Others might not mind this as much, if at all.

So that disclaimer aside, if you're at all interested in Amy's life, how she made it to SNL and what her experiences there were like, this is a great book that you will truly enjoy.