Category: Books

Tinay Fey does not need me to write a review of her book as she is Tina Fey and I am not. And because it sat on the New York Times BestSeller List for a good long time. And because she won the Mark Twain Award for humor a few years ago. And because she spent more time writing for network television than I did. But I am compelled to write a review of Bossypants because I have never laughed so much in my life.

If you read nothing else, you have to read the chapter on her father, Don Fey, and the incident with the rug shampooer. Priceless. It’s the one time in decades that I wished I had had a dad in order to tell that kind of joke and later to relate what it was like to watch someone like Lorne Michaels meet someone like Don Fey. Priceless.

Maybe it helps that I, too, am a short-statured brunette who survived growing up in the Midwest in the reign of Reagan and I had many of the same crazy, gay-male-friends-coming-out-to-me-and-only-me during college theatre experiences as Fey has had. Maybe it helps that I, too, have often been the ‘bossiest’ or ‘pushiest’ short-statured brunette in a room full of blondes (whether they be men or women). Maybe it helps that I, too, have been a working mom in businesses where all the men have wives to handle the personal side of their lives. But I don’t think so.

What’s so great about the book — besides the fact that I laughed so hard for so long so many times that my cats came to sit with me because they thought the tears running down my face meant I was watching The Way We Were again – is that she is such a good writer that she brought me to true tears in a paragraph about working with homeless men at a YMCA in her first just-out-of-college job on Christmas Eve while Whitney Houston’s rendition of “I Will Always Love You” played on her Walkman. Heck, I just brought myself to tears summarizing her story!

Sometimes she gives you a funny metaphor followed by an asterisk and rather than having the asterisk lead to a citation (like most of my academic books do) her asterisks lead to a choice of two or three other funny lines she could have used instead, giving you the option of which laugh works best for you. Or they clarify the truth behind a sarcastic point she has made, just in case you, the reader, are not fully schooled in the realities of being a woman in improv in Chicago in the 1990s.

Clearly, I LOVED this book. I think the final cherry on top of the sundae of reading was that one of her final chapters dealt with managing a weekend that involved Oprah Winfrey guesting on 30 Rock, herself doing her Sarah Palin impression on SNL that evening, and hosting her toddler daughter’s pirate birthday party the next day. To Fey’s credit she ranked each of these events evenly, though the photo she chose to include celebrated the success of her pirate cake and not of either of the other successes of that wild and weary working mother weekend.

 

In a recent Facebook post I mentioned reading more poetry recently (as a preface to quoting Rudyard Kipling’s If).  I’m not sure how Kipling brought me to finally reading some of the work of Nikki Giovanni, but I’ve just finished two of her poetry books back to back and enjoyed each immensely.  First I tasted her newest, Chasing Utopia:  A Hybrid, and then went back to her earlier book, Bicycles, which ends with the poem “We Are Virginia Tech”, a poem she delivered at the memorial for the students who died during the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007 where she taught poetry.

I hated to realize that’s the event that brought her work to my attention, but it is, and if poetry is about truth then so, too, should a review of a poet be about truth. Truth is what I found in her work as well as a truly original and inclusive voice.  I say both original and inclusive because she spoke from her own reality – that of being an African American female who grew up in Ohio, studied history in college and works as a college professor and professional writer – but inclusive because if you take the “African” away from “African American” then every thing I used to describe her, describes me, and her work reminded me so much more of our similarities than of our perceived-by-society differences.  True, her frequent references to African American leaders and culture would catch me off – I knew to whom she referenced (I spent my college years wrapped up in Prince mania) but kept realizing she is one of the few poets I’ve read who uses such references primarily and I knew that some people would find that exclusive.  Yet all her poems about love and loss were universal, especially “Love (And the Meaning of Love)” from Bicycles, which called up memories of teenage angst over the one great question we all had:

I wanted to
But you couldn’t

I hoped 
But you wouldn’t

I understood 
Why we shouldn’t

So you declined
And we didn’t 

But it would
Have been fun

If we would’ve.

What I most like about this poem is her ability to sketch out such deep emotion through the efficient use of such simple wording.  She does that again and again.  I a poem also in Bicycles called “I Provide” she lists all the things one lover provides to the other and ends with:

Everything you need
I provide 

Now tell me
Why
You’re not happy

Giovanni uses word layout similarly to one of my favorite poets – e.e. cummings – without employing his love for radical spelling and grammar.  Her poem “Everything Good is Simple” seems to sum up her writing right there in the title.

In Utopia I found more evidence of her earlier, more political writings, the ones that brought her originally to the public’s attention.   Poems like “Note to the South:  You Lost” (which I intend to send to all my Civil War historian friends as a fun thing to let their students ponder:  why if they lost – and after fighting for such a horrendous cause — do we still admire them so?  

Giovanni also considers her poetry – and by extension all writing – political in her piece “The Significance of Poetry”.  In Utopia she writes about jazz as political fodder and about the blues and even the act of loving as a political choice (who, when, how).  I found her work wonderful to ponder and her words wonderful to wander, probably due to the truth behind the lines in “Werewolf Avoidance”:  

Poets should be strong
In our emotions
And our words that might make us 
difficult to live with but I do believe
easier to love
Poet it garlic
Not for everyone
But those who take it
Never get caught
By werewolves 

Hear more on Nikki Giovanni in her NPRinterview on Tell Me More (from Tuesday July 29, 1014)

More books by Nikki Giovanni

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Summer is my reading time, always has been. Whole books get swallowed in a day or two only to be followed by other whole books. Sometimes they are classics I’ve always meant to get to but most often they are books that I find mentioned in articles I read and the mention makes me realize I missed the book the first go round. So I trot on over to my library’s website and put the book on hold. The most current literary gem I’ve discovered is My Beloved World by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. She says she wrote it with the help of a poet friend and the lushness of the language attests to that truth. But what I liked best about the book was her relentless positivity in the face of some sad things that happened to her. Rather than wallow in the sadness, as some memoirs do (Frank McCourt in Angela’s Ashes comes to mind here) Sotomayor uses every sad experience to highlight a lesson she learned and almost immediately put into practice with positive results. The poet’s assistance also shines through on the narrative structure of the individual chapters – they often start with the most interesting piece of dialogue en media res – and then backtrack to explain how she found herself in that moment, making us active participants in the teachable moment.

“What I liked best about the book was her relentless positivity in the face of some sad things that happened to her.”

The other thing I loved about the book is the fact that she vividly recalls the moment she discovered the career she ultimately created – and she credits television for bringing it to her. I’ve often cringed when people told me that old saw about how TV rots our brains. Yeah, sure, I usually say. If you watch a dizzying dose of reality nonsense from capitalistic Kardashians to racist roommates on Big Brother, it rots your brain and wastes hours of your life better spent loving other people (in all ways that word can be understood). But if you actively watch decent stuff studies show you can learn empathy for others as you worry about your favorite characters and wonder how you would behave in similarly difficult situations. But in Sotomayor’s case TV did the other thing it deserves credit for doing. It introduced an impoverished child to the larger world that existed and gave her the goal of achieving entrance into that world through the only doorway offered her – education. Sotomayor discusses watching Perry Mason and realizing that, though the brilliant lawyer was the star of the show, the real power in the courtroom was held in the hands of the judge who told that brilliant lawyer whether or not he won.

The other things Sotomayor does that are refreshing and eye-opening is she frankly discusses the fact that being a single, career-minded, successful woman in the world today can be enough if you nurture a set of deep friends supporting them in their endeavors. Her discussion of how much fun it is to be an aunt brought a smile to my face for all the single women I know. Secondly, she mentioned an assignment given to her in one of her early history classes at Princeton – to do a family history – and how finally asking her mother how she and her father met taught her to see that everyone has difficulties and those should not define a person. Rather, one should be defined by the way they face those difficulties.

Finally, Sotomayor’s memoir puts a face on an experience I read more deeply about in another book I always recommend to my first year college students – Limbo: Blue Collar Roots, White Collar World – the experience of being the first in your family to attend college. The idea that she didn’t know the Ivy League was any more difficult to get into than other colleges so she submitted applications to Harvard and Yale and Princeton, was accepted by all and finally settled on Princeton. Then that her first generation naivete made her originally toss out an invite into Phi Beta Kappa because it sounded like an excuse to sell her a pin for precious money she wasn’t in the habit of wasting. Those are still real experiences for many first generation students and worth seeing come to life in her life.

In many ways her look at the childhood of a Puerto Rican immigrant family in the 1960s was eerily familiar with the Irish immigrant stories from the 1900s from one of my favorite childhood classics – A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I can’t say when I’ve enjoyed a memoir more.