Related: I Love You, Man! Amy Poehler and Rashida Jones Q&A We can write our own.' Yes Please isn't a scan of the comedic brain so much as it is something far better-the full exposure of Poehler's funny and very magnanimous heart. Although that spirit gives the book a delightfully frenetic pace, Poehler is precise and careful with her words: 'A story carves deep grooves into our brains each time we tell it,' she writes. Poehler plays with format, molding chapters into haikus, listicles, and scripts, in a kind of literary improv. There are many such dedications here: to sons Archie and Abel, to a TSA agent, and to her Parks and Rec co-stars, for example. Poehler devotes a chapter to Fey, her 'comedy wife,' the barbed wire to her slinky brand of humor, thanking her (with a snazzy acrostic poem) for catalyzing her storied career on SNL. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play There's too much blue language in her hilarious tirade to quote it here, so let's just say it involves a high-speed chase: 'All of my lower-middle-class Boston issues rose to the surface.' ('It was…the only sketch I regret from SNL,' she writes.) She also memorably describes her tornado-like temper tantrums, one of which occurred on a first-class flight with Ana Gasteyer and Tina Fey. She especially rues enraging actor Chris Cooper and his wife, Marianne, with an insensitive skit spoofing a developmentally disabled child, and taking five years to apologize. Poehler, 43, retraces her wonderfully normal childhood in suburban Massachusetts from her birth (her sweet teacher-mom contributes this passage) to her falling in love with improv as Dorothy in an elementary school production of The Wizard of Oz to a summer job scooping ice cream.īut don't take Poehler for a blonde with no bite she shares plenty of tales of mischief, mayhem, and even remorse. In fact, the Saturday Night Live veteran and Parks and Recreation star's career forecast reads as mostly sunny with a high chance of silly (two sample chapter titles: 'Humping Justin Timberlake' and 'Obligatory Drug Stories, or Lessons I Learned on Mushrooms'). The path of comedic genius doesn't have to be dark and stormy, as Amy Poehler demonstrates in her bristlingly intelligent, guffaw-out-loud memoir, Yes Please (Dey Street).

Memoir by poehler