Book: Yes Please by Amy Poehler

I listened to Yes Please in my car over the course of about a week during my evening commute home. I wrote a fan letter after the first two hour ride home. I almost never write fan letters. I have written all of three in my life. Yes Please is a hilarious read (which I was expecting). It is also genuine, heartfelt, inspiring, generous, kind, and thoughtful. I was expecting some of that, but maybe not all of it. I cried as much as I laughed. Poehler shares stories and anecdotes about her life, ruminating on the existential. It can be considered a light read, but there are parts that are very deeply moving and that touch on things beyond the privilege and champagne problems of a Hollywood celebrity, things that Poehler herself is only too ready to admit are not truly problems at all.

The book is non-traditional in it's non-linearity. It skips around a little between timelines and periods of her life, but seem more grouped by certain kinds of experiences or certain kinds of realizations that have happened. She is encouraging and mindful and the stories and insights helped me to get through a dark patch during which all I wanted was an extinction level event to wipe out humanity and re-set the playing field for the rest of the planet (even the few thousand of us who would probably survive). Admittedly, I was being melodramatic, but I was in my feels and I couldn't see a way out of it until I listened to Amy Poehler's infectious laugh, her amazing stories about working on SNL, and realized that I needed to take a chill pill and that everything was going to be alright in the end.
( Read more... )