Bossypants

The final chapters of Fey’s book come full circle, in terms of both plot and message. By noting that both working moms and stay-at-home moms take time out to sob, she reiterates the difficulty women have feeling satisfied by any of the narrow choices they’re offered. Working mothers are condemned as witches who selfishly abandon their children; however, moms who don’t work outside the house feel a different kind of emptiness. Fey drives this point home by noting that she sobs in a free ten minutes at work, time magazines suggest women should “use for sit-ups and triceps dips” (235). Magazines—and by extension, society in general—do not allow women time to breathe, time to be human. Though the magazines’ command is hyperbolic, the suggestion is that women’s only real job is to serve others, not only by taking care of their children but also by ceaselessly tending to their appearance in order to satisfy outside observers. In short, the standards are relentless, impossible to meet, and ultimately dissatisfying.

Fey expresses hope, however, in her discussion of how she and her daughter bond over fingernail cuttings at six o’clock in the morning. Feeling sad for missing time with her daughter and hesitant to confront the babysitter during cherished time at home, Fey finds compromise by cutting her own daughter’s fingernails at a time that fits into her own schedule, and she writes that some of the best moments are those you don’t expect. The idea that mothers can create these special moments out of such seemingly small situations offers hope that women can, in fact, find some satisfaction, even if it’s not conventional. It’s one more example of how lessons are learned when you aren’t looking for them and how improvisation becomes Fey’s “worldview” (75).

In her final chapter, Fey asks how she should spend the last five minutes, and she deliberately chooses to spend them talking about the double standards facing women, specifically the difficulties of aging women who no longer meet those standards. Throughout her book, Fey has repeatedly addressed the pressure women face to be “beautiful”; in this chapter, she adds that women not only have to meet impossible standards but that they also must do it on a timeline. Once women are no longer considered attractive, they are not seen as valuable; they are “crazy” for thinking they still have the right to an opinion, that they still have the right to exist. Just as her male friends didn’t want to date her until she was skinny, male producers in show business brush off older women they “don’t want to fuck” (246). Like fertility, usefulness in show business has an expiration date, and Fey feels the pressure of both.

The book opens with Fey’s comment that her mother was 40 years old when Fey was born. In the final chapter, Fey returns to her mother, noting that she remembers her mother’s late pregnancy when she considers whether she should have another baby herself. Fey writes that her mother’s laughter at the little Greek boy her mother babysits is “[a] phenomenon [she] now understand at all levels” (249)—as a mother herself, she can recognize when children take their own problems too seriously. By wondering if she herself is like this child, a “little tiny person with nothing to worry about” (250), she demonstrates the same humility with which she’s written the entire book.