61 pages • 2 hours read
Tina FeyBossypants
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Young Men’s Christian Association”
Fey moves to Chicago after college and, after unsuccessfully applying for jobs in a restaurant and a lawyer’s office, lands a job working the front desk at the YMCA, “the epicenter of all human grimness” (63). There, she tends to the motley mix of directionless male residents and checks the member cards of young moms. Among her coworkers are Donna, who works the phones and complains a lot, and Eli, a preschool teacher, aspiring actor, and “complete nerd” (66) whose “plans for a one-man show about Charlie Chaplin” (72) never materialize.
Every day, Fey wakes up at 4:40 to arrive for work at 5:30. On her way back from buying pizza some nights, she crosses Gregory, whose head injury damaged his short-term memory so that he repeats his life story every time they meet. Fey notices that the office workers upstairs, who enjoy more freedoms without regularly being yelled at by residents, “had it made” (68)—all, perhaps, except “Mr. Mczrkskczk,” who runs the residence and “experienced zero point zero fun in his day-to-day work” (69). Mr. Mczrkskczk organizes the holiday dinner for the lonely residents; Fey, on her way to see her family a couple of days before Christmas, imagines him in the dollar store buying 40 pairs of tube socks for residents’ presents and spends the day in tears. Other familiar faces include John Donnelly, a wealthy donor who is given whatever he wants “no matter how much of a prick he was” (70), and “sweet goon Timmy,” a resident who, while off his medication, makes a lewd remark to a departing female gym member.
Fey recognizes “a power pyramid” at the YMCA in which the bottom is composed of “all these disenfranchised residents who had to be taken care of like children” (71). Next are “a middle class of women who did all the work” (71). Above them are “two or three of the least-useful men you ever met” (71). Finally, there is the Executive Director, “who had no idea who anyone was or what anyone did” (71).
Fey takes improv classes at night, making the early hours and low pay less manageable. After a particularly trying day, Fey interviews for and achieves an office job, stealing it from Donna, who’d told her about it in the first place. She admits this “makes me sound like a jerk” (73) and reminds readers that she never was the underdog.
Chapter 8 Summary: “The Windy City, Full of Meat”
Fey explains that she’d moved to Chicago to study improv and that working at The Second City theater, which produced countless renowned comedians, was “[t]he most fun job [she] ever had” (74). She “love[s] the idea of two actors on stage with nothing—no costumes, no sets, no dialogue—who make up something together that is then completely real to everyone in the room” (74). The “cult”-like study of improvisation leads her toward her career at Saturday Night Live and “changed the way [she] look[s] at the world” (75).
Working for the touring company, which travels around the country performing the theater’s best sketches, she and her beloved colleagues replace some of the material they are supposed to use with their own original sketches. As punishment, the producers assign her company the worst shows.
Members of the touring company hope to be promoted to the main company, in which members are paid better wages to perform original sketches in Chicago. Fey writes about the “institutionalized gender nonsense” at The Second City: producers cast more men than women because “the women wouldn’t have any ideas” (80) for parts and because they fear audiences wouldn’t like a scene between two women. Eventually, producers decide to have an equal number of men and women in each company, and Fey “got to be that third woman in the first gender-equal cast” (80).
Fey muses on the contrived competition between women by remembering an actress at Saturday Night Live who was worried that the hiring of another female actor would mean she herself would have less screen time; Fey doesn’t understand this fear, for they couldn’t run out of roles “if we made up the show” (81). As a result of these experiences, Fey tells women that “[p]eople are going to try to trick you” (81) into believing women are in competition with each other. She dreams of the day when “sketch comedy shows become a gender-blind meritocracy of whoever is really the funniest” (81).
In a text box called “The Rules of Improvisation That Will Change Your Life and Reduce Belly Fat,” Fey lays out the rules of improv. First, always agree with the situation your partner creates. Second, it’s not enough to say “Yes”—say “YES, AND” to contribute to the scene. Next, make statements rather than ask questions; asking questions requires your partner to do the work. Finally, “there are no mistakes, only beautiful happy accidents” (78) that open the doors for opportunities.
Chapter 9 Summary: “My Honeymoon, or a Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again Either”
As Fey’s husband is terrified of flying, they honeymoon on a cruise to Bermuda. The couple in the room next to them “are comically drunk most of the time,” and the pool makes “you feel like you are taking a bath with strangers” (84). The cruise director, Dan Dan the Party Man, organizes activities around the pool. During mealtimes, Fey and her husband sit at their assigned table with “middle-aged in-laws from the Delaware Water Gap” (84). The group discusses “dog breeds and fishing” (84) while serenaded by the raucous laughter of the drunken people at the next table. The food “is as good as any restaurant in New York (between 48th and 50th Street on Seventh Avenue)” (84). Fey enjoys the plentiful dessert table not so much for the taste of the desserts but for “their unlimited quantities” (85).
For weeks Fey has been eagerly looking forward to a guided island tour bicycle ride that ends with swimming and cocktails on the beach. Upon discovering she’d mistaken the date and that they’ve missed it, Fey begins to cry “in a way that reveals that I’m not finding the rest of the cruise that fun” (86).
The last night, she and her husband attend the formal dinner and performance, during which the captain suddenly orders passengers to go to their muster stations. When they arrive, they’re told there’s been a fire in the engine room; men are moved to the back while women and children are ordered in front. Fey remarks: “They still really do that” (88). Fey expects the ship to explode at any moment. At three o’clock in the morning, they are allowed to go back to their rooms. The traumatized passengers, who Fey realizes are all afraid of flying, are brought back to Bermuda and put on a plane to New York. They arrive home safely, “shaken but tan” (91).
Fey receives a free cruise offer in the mail but proclaims she “shall not cruise again” because “[y]ou wouldn’t take a vacation where you ride on a stagecoach for two months but there’s all-you-can-eat shrimp” (92). After a half-serious conversation in which Fey and her husband discuss whether Fey would have gotten on the life boat without him, they “begin [their] married life” (93).
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
In “All Girls Must Be Everything,” Fey writes about the many impossible beauty ideals imposed on women. In “Delaware County Summer Showtime!” and “Climbing Old Rag Mountain,” she discusses her competition with other girls. Here, in “Young Men’s Christian Association” and “The Windy City, Full of Meat,” Fey connects these experiences by revealing as the root of competition between women the patriarchal power structures that pit women against each other.
In a world in which women are expected to “bolt on some breast implants” and “work on” becoming “hot” (23) until they achieve society’s perfect embodiment of female beauty, women’s intelligence and abilities are considered inferior to men’s. It’s little wonder then that the producers at The Second City reject the suggestion to even out the number of men and women in the cast because “[t]here won’t be enough parts […] for the girls”—in other words, “the women wouldn’t have any ideas” (80).This “insulting implication” (80) reminds Fey of the Saturday Night Live actress who feels the hiring of another actress threatens to reduce her lines. This example illustrates how deeply rooted sexism and discrimination are. Women are “fooled” (81) into believing one woman’s success necessitates another woman’s failure. Fey emphasizes that this mindset is a fallacy, pointing out that “if we made up the show” (81), "we" being women, then there wouldn't be the perceived competition for roles. In other words, women have more power than they’re led to believe. This objectification—and the acceptance of living in a male-dominated world—is so ingrained in women that they end up scrambling for scraps, whether they be a precious few lines in a sketch, a menial YMCA job within a “power pyramid” where “kept the place running” for “the least-useful men you ever met” (71), or, in the case of the boyfriend who left her at Summer Showtime, a guy who “gave me a box of microwave popcorn and a used battery tester” (27) for her birthday. Women, writes Fey, should not be “fooled” into competing with women—women are “in competition with everyone” (81). It’s a lesson she demonstrates she herself has internalized: as a teenager, she perpetrated “girl-on-girl sabotage” (37) to prevent the girl who “stole” her boyfriend from being cast in a Summer Showtime play. Today, she “would never sabotage a fellow female like that” (38), having learned this competition is unnecessary, counterproductive, and contrived by a patriarchal system.
Part of what makes Fey’s style so entertaining is that she illustrates what she saw at the time, while simultaneously speaking from a point of wisdom. In “My Honeymoon, or A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again Either,” Fey writes of the “fun activities” (84) on the cruise ship. She describes how the towels are folded into animals shapes and again tells her readers that “[i]t’s just fun. Don’t overthink it” (84). When she and her husband miss the bike excursion she’d been looking forward to, she cries “in a way that reveals [she's] not finding the rest of the cruise that fun” (86). By reiterating how “fun” the cruise is, she manages to convey that it’s not fun at all. Rather, she tells herself it’s fun in order to avoid having to acknowledge that their honeymoon is going horribly. She utilizes a similar technique back in “Climbing Old Rag Mountain” when she tells herself there is nothing unusual about the fact that Handsome Robert Wuhl meets her only at night and keeps their relationship a secret. This good-natured self-deprecation adds humor to the book, but more importantly, it demonstrates Fey’s honesty in regard to her mistakes and her willingness to learn and grow.
