Yes Please!

Yes Please by Amy Poehler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

3.5 stars. Poehler starts out shaky, complaining again and again that writing a book "is very hard". It is hard knowing that what you are writing most certainly WILL be published and WILL be read by a very lot of people. Which is not the same "hard" as trying to get a book published and maybe getting read by a few people. You can almost hear her questioning herself on how she can be entertaining but not embarrassing, truthful but not offensive. Then, as she goes along, she gets more comfortable and by the end, some of her best writing is almost transcendent. "Gimme that Pudding" starts it out by talking about the backstory of those hilarious bits she and other comedians did at awards ceremonies, and "My Boys" is a brilliant essay about helping in Haiti while having to coordinate the details of hosting the Oscars. The trouble with many comedians books are that their strengths--Poheler's is playing off of others and improvisation--don't always translate well into books, and we as fans don't allow for different personas. Once Poehler stops bemoaning this fact and just writes she becomes quite the writer.

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The strange thing is that the moment people start looking at you less is when you start being able to see through people more.