Amy Poehler’s Inspirational, Hilarious Yes Please

A memoir that delivers on expectations
Fans will go into Amy Poehler’s book hoping to find hilarity, advice, and stories about Poehler’s fabulous life rapping with Sarah Palin on Weekend Update nine months pregnant. Yes Please delivers on all of these fronts. It’s funny—reading it is like watching an Amy Poehler improv show. It’s inspiring—the advice it contains makes us want to hug the author and be better to others. And it’s revealing. Poehler’s account of her run-ins, inside jokes, and personal exchanges with celebrities makes show business sound collegial and fun.
A charming mix
Yes Please is less a straightforward memoir than it is a delightful collage of various forms. It includes well-told anecdotes; haikus; a hand-scrawled list of reasons to cry on an airplane; deeply-felt essays; voicey lists; chapters by Seth Myers, “Parks and Recreation” co-creator Michael Schur, and Amy Poehler’s mom; mini-tributes to your favorite SNL characters; glimpses of seminal moments in Poehler’s whirlwind career (how is she only 43?); smart advice that you can tell she lives by; and fun pictures and notes arranged like the pages of a scrapbook.
Childhood memories
Poehler recalls her Massachusetts childhood with clarity. The details she remembers will transport you back to your own childhood—and show you a vivid picture of 1970s style. “That basement was like my personal Copa Cabana, and when it was filled with my parents’ friends I would sit on the stairs and listen to the clink of their glasses and their bursts of laughter. I would make an excuse to pad down in my Holly Hobbie nightgown and pretend I’d had a bad dream, all in an attempt to peep at the women with their shiny brown lipstick and the men packing their cigarettes against their hips.”
Battling insecurity
Poehler doesn’t expose any secrets about her divorce from Will Arnett, write more than an acrostic about Tina Fey (acrostics are “the laziest form of writing,” according to Poehler), or dive into anything too juicy about her SNL history. (“It’s tough for me to find a single story that would really explain to you what SNL felt like or what it meant to me. So I’m not going to try. I told you, writing is HARD.”) She values her privacy. But what the memoir lacks in gossip, it makes up for in self-examination. You feel you get to know the person behind the fame, the one who battles self-criticism by saying, “Hey, cool it. Amy is my friend. Don’t talk about her like that.”
More than just funny
At her most affecting, Poehler slows down and speaks with her readers not as if they’re an audience she’s cracking up, but as if they’re her friends. She writes about how she draws power from women, how she loves her babies, how she feels helpless, how she is lucky and knows it, how she plucks enjoyment from life on a draining day, and how she believes in time travel. (“The key to time travel is that you can only move if you are actually in the moment. You have to be where you are to get where you need to go.”) She talks about sex and drugs and being mean and perpetually tired and how she’s struggling to write the book you hold in your hands. She’s not running for president; she’s allowing you to get to know her. A story about how she accidentally offended a set of twins with cerebral palsy turns into a lesson in forgiveness and humility and apologizing and doing edgy comedy and living with yourself when you want to run over yourself with your car all at once.
Yes Please is the ideal gift for anyone who needs a dose of humor, inspiration, or sympathy—which, during the holiday season, means all of us.