Reading “Yes Please” was like going to see your best friend perform in a bad play. You sit there in the darkened theatre and you really try to like it, because you love your best friend. You can’t help it, the show is bad and your best friend is bad too. So you do what any good friend would do, if any part in the play is even a little funny you compensate by laughing extra loud. Then when you see your BFF you’re like “That was great! And the set was really fantastic.” And leave it at that.
I wanted so badly to like this book because I love Amy Poehler, who doesn’t? She starts the book off telling us to lower our expectations, saying that with kids, and work, and her divorce that she didn’t do her best job. She was just being modest right, self-deprecating for the sake of comedy right?
Not so much. “Yes Please” couldn’t seem to decide what it wanted to be, for me I expected a memoir. Childhood stories, SNL stories, improv stories etc., however half the time this book seemed to attempt to be some sort of self-help book. A chapter would start out promising to tell a funny story about Poehler’s young life, and would end up giving you sage advice and asking you to fill in blank pages with your own birth story.
Poehler does head up a website called Smart Girls at the Party, which posts uplifting and inspiring articles and also includes a weekly segment in which Poehler interviews a strong female role model. It’s a great project, it seemed that Poelher tried to incorporate some of that energy into her book, but it just didn’t seem genuine.
She used fo-creativity throughout the book to make up for a lack of content. Lists, pictures and a chapter written by Seth Myers, which told a story that had already been told. The entire book teased to a chapter that would discuss the now famous friendship between herself and Tina Fey. It was sorely lacking, and ended with a half-hearted acrostic of Fey’s name scribbled on a blank page that left the reader wondering if the friendship was even real.
Whenever Poelher would get to a meatier topic; her divorce, drug use, ex-boyfriends, she glazes over them only to move on to another general quote “People are very bad and very good. A little love goes a long way.” Or “The truth is, writing is this: hard and boring and occasionally great but usually not.”
It’s unclear whether Poehler got caught up in trying to deliver her Smart Girls message and forgot to include more personal stories, or if she is simply not cut out to write. Either way “Yes Please” rambled around unsure of its purpose while simultaneously pandering to a general audience.
She had a few quotes that worked, one my favorites being “Going from crying to laughing that fast and hard happens maybe five times in your life and that extreme right turn is the reason why we are alive, and I believe it extends our life by many years.”
Poelher had such big shoes to fill, knowing that “Yes Please” would be held up against the likes of Tina Fey’s “BossyPants” and Mindy Kaling’s “Is Everyone Hanging out Without Me?” just to name a few. Unfortunately, not only did it not stack up but it didn’t even seem to be written in the same style. It was very stressful writing this review about a woman I, and so many others, admire so much. She is still very admirable; one bad book does not a fallen idol make. However, her heart was not in this book, she knew it and the reader knew it.
“I have told people that writing this book has been like brushing away dirt from a fossil. What a load of crap. It has been like hacking away at a freezer with a screwdriver.” Yes, that was abundantly clear.
