I have only recently become a fan of Parks and Recreation and purchased this book quite by chance; I have to admit that I am not overly interested in the lives of famous people unless they are someone that I really admire. However, I had an inkling that Yes Please might actually be quite funny and I wasn’t wrong.
The book is split up into three different sections and then subdivided under these with further headings like Talk To Yourself Like You’re Ninety, Treat Your Career Like A Bad Boyfriend and my personal favourite, My World-Famous Sex Advice (for the title, not the subject matter!). Poehler draws on her own experiences to share her life wisdom along with its successes and its pitfalls and this is delivered with humour and honesty.
If you are reading this as a way of finding out the dirt about Amy, you will be very disappointed. She shares what she wants to share. She does touch on her marriage and divorce as well as her relationship at the time of writing this book; she discusses to a degree her friendships with fellow comedians and there is quite a lot about Saturday Night Live and Parks and Recreation; she talks about her kids and some cute stuff that they say and also mentions pregnancy but there is very much a sense that she is telling you this stuff because she wants you to know it and she’s really not bothered if it’s not seedy enough or emotional enough. Personally, I liked this – it is a light read with some serious subject matter. I didn’t leave reading it feeling like I’d been through the wringer but I felt like there was still an element of the confessional to the whole thing which satisfied my curiosity and didn’t leave me wanting.
It made me laugh out loud and I have to say that there was a lot of her views which I share. I am not ashamed to admit that I read it as if I was being talked to by Lesley Knope, although a slightly more risqué, less public service motivated version.
As famous people’s biographies go, it was different, both in the way that it was constructed and its content, which I think is to be expected due to the provenance of is author. But don’t let that put you off – it’s great!
Scuffed Granny 