It’s obvious just from a glance at the cover (in which Fey’s made-up face and blow-waved hair are teamed with hairy man-hands) that Bossypants is not your average celebrity memoir. But then, Tina Fey is not your average celebrity either. For one thing, she’s as well known for her writing as her performing; as well as being the creator and star of critical darling 30 Rock, she was head writer for Saturday Night Live and wrote the screenplay for the best high school movie ever (or: the best high school movie not by John Hughes), Mean Girls. And for another, she’s lately been the postergirl for the average-looking smart woman, with unlikely turns in Vogue and on the cover of Vanity Fair. Both kinds of notoriety promise an above-average reading experience.

In what is more a linked series of personal essays than a traditional narrative memoir, Fey takes the reader on a tour of her childhood, her early days as a performer on the Chicago improv scene, landing her dream job as an SNL writer, conceiving and launching 30 Rock and the weird and wonderful time she spent impersonating Sarah Palin during the last US election. She also offers carefully edited glimpses into her personal life – her relationship with her parents, husband and child – while managing not to reveal much about anyone apart from herself.

This is a terrifically entertaining book that unsurprisingly reads much like a conversation with her 30 Rock alter-ego Liz Lemon. Unflattering childhood pictures combine with embarrassing stories about her early self and tongue-in-cheek self-reflection (her teenage gay friends liked her because ‘I was so funny and so mean and mature for my age!’). Her stories about working in a male-dominated comedy world (‘only in comedy, by the way, does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity’) and the challenges and absurdities of her busy personal life (‘when Oprah Winfrey is suggesting you may have overextended yourself, you need to examine your fucking life’) are, Lemon-like, spiked with wit and insight.

That said, there are moments in the book that feel like padding. While the essay on her Christmas holidays, ‘A Celebrity’s Guide to Celebrating the Birth of Jesus’ made me very happy to learn that I’m not the only woman over 35 who doesn’t have her driver’s licence (yes, I know she lives in New York), it read a bit much like ‘What I did on my holiday’. And likewise, the story about her awful cruise ship honeymoon (her husband doesn’t like to fly) was a bit meh.

Though perhaps it’s no accident that workaholic Fey doesn’t write well about holidays. It’s entirely forgivable, given that she writes so very, very well about her real passion in life – work. And not just the highlights of working with various people (though there is that), but the mechanics of it. For example, on the practicality of balancing using comedy as a platform for saying what you think and doing the job of entertaining an audience, she writes, ‘You may have a point to make about the health care system in America, but you’ll find you need to present that idea through a legally blind bus driver or as an exotic dancer whose boobs are running for mayor.’ This point is aptly demonstrated elsewhere with her behind-the-scenes run-down of her first Sarah Palin sketch, with friend and long-time collaborator Amy Poehler as Hilary Clinton, in which they spoke out together against sexism in the campaign. (‘You all watched a sketch about feminism and you didn’t even realize it because of all the jokes,’ she writes gleefully.)

Gender politics is Fey’s other particular strong suit, from her memories of not realising when she got her first period because she thought the liquid was supposed to be blue, like in the ads, to her pithy deconstruction of what she calls ‘The Myth of Not Enough’ – the panic that there are only so many slots available to women and one woman’s success is at the expense of another. ‘You’re not in competition with other women,’ she writes. ‘You’re in competition with everyone.’ She doesn’t always say just what you’d expect, though – the mark of someone who says what she believes, and really thinks about it, rather than simply saying what her type of person is supposed to believe. In the very entertaining chapter on glamorous photo shoots, ‘Amazing, Gorgeous, Not Like That,’ she admits that she has no problem with Photoshop, arguing that nobody is fooled by it anyway, and it’s better to digitally alter an image than surgically alter your body. (‘I feel about Photoshop the way some people feel about abortion. It is appalling and a tragic reflection on the moral decay of our society ... unless I need it, in which case, everybody be cool.’)

If you are a fan of smart, funny women, you’ll love Bossypants. If you think women aren’t funny*, then buy a DVD of Two and a Half Men instead.

*(And maybe take the advice of Fey herself on the subject: ‘It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good. I don’t like Chinese food, but I don’t write articles trying to prove it doesn’t exist.’)

Jo Case is editor of Readings Monthly.