Emily's Reviews > Yes Please

YES REALLY. I almost gave this two stars, except it includes George Clooney and that would be a crime.

This book is fine. It didn't charm me. It actually took me about three or four days to read 288 pages, which is funny because a lot of those pages don't include any actual words (she's got a ton of photocopies and inspirational signs intermixed with the text). It just wasn't as fun to read as I anticipated.

The problem is that she spends most of the book talking about how hard it is to write a book, or how she struggles with her self perception, or how she doesn’t like people knowing her business. (Incidentally, I think self-perception is an extremely valuable topic for women and teenagers, but perhaps not what I was interested in reading when I picked this up.) Sometimes she’s able to turn the “I don’t actually want to tell you anything about myself” into a pretty funny chapter, like when she writes out the descriptions of divorce self-help books she’d like to write. (Spoiler alert: she doesn’t want to talk about her relationship with Will Arnett at all, which is certainly her right.)

But this means that she skips over many of the periods of her life that I was most interested in, like the founding of UCB and her subsequent success. She goes through a lot of, “Then we got a bigger theater, and then a bigger one, and then I was hired at SNL." For most of the book, I felt like she was skipping over the truly interesting side stories. There are some anecdotes from SNL and Parks and Rec, but there are surprisingly few given how much time she's spent on both shows.

Then again, back to George Clooney:

(view spoiler)[

On the day of the awards I simply asked George Clooney’s people to check and make sure George was okay with my sitting next to him at some point during the broadcast. “Of course!” said George’s people, after not asking him. I knew enough not to ask them to check with George and see if it was okay to sit on his lap. This was a request better saved for the last minute and in person. Or better yet, when the time came, I would just sit on his lap without even asking. As the old saying goes, “Don’t ask for permission to sit on George Clooney’s lap, beg for forgiveness once you do.”

So I sat on George’s lap, and ever the pro, George asked me what kind of bit I was cooking up. I told him when they cut to me in the audience after announcing my nomination for best comedy actress I was going to act totally engrossed in talking to him. I told him I thought it would be funny if we were just flirting and laughing. He understood immediately and handed me a glass of champagne. I told him if I won there was a very good chance I would kiss him hard on the mouth. He responded, “That’s not a bad Sunday.” As the camera cut to me he whispered in my ear, “The thing about making movies is …”

(hide spoiler)]



Perhaps if I’d listened to this as an audiobook, I might have enjoyed it more. When I went back to read some sentences over and consciously tried to hear her voice, I definitely thought some of it was funnier. But overall, I vacillated between two and three stars, and landed on three only because this is Amy Poehler’s book. YES, REALLY.