My Squirrel Days

August 13, 2018
Actress Kemper tickles the funny bone with her engaging and refreshing memoir. Hers is not the tale of a rough childhood (she grew up in a comfortable suburban St. Louis neighborhood with a loving family), overarching drama (her righteous indignation is confined to an uneducated guide on a The Sound of Music tour in Salzberg, Austria), or unhappy marriages (she’s been married to Michael Koman since 2012). Instead, in a snappy, coordinated series of essays, Kemper—who plays the title character in Netflix’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, after a side-splitting role in The Office—­amusingly chronicles her life, never hesitating to make fun of herself. She is an entertaining writer, and her tales—including those about auditioning for Saturday Night Live, complimenting Tina Fey (“You have great hair—really strong and thick!”), and tripping while running to fetch a glass of water for her childhood crush, Christopher Plummer (“I sprinted to the bar as fast as my Naired legs could carry me”)—will give readers an enticing glimpse of her happy-go-lucky attitude. This is a fun, breezy, and enjoyable volume.

August 15, 2018
The debut book from the Emmy-nominated actress.It's clear within the first chapter of actress Kemper's memoir that the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt star is still playing a character. Her role in the text is that of clever, albeit controlling, comedy writer disguised as the girl next door. Strategically revealing only what she wants the reader to see, the Princeton graduate's English degree--and her experience as a writer for the Onion--is on full display. The author begins by portraying herself as a precocious child, with a rambling chapter about her obsession with her second-grade student teacher, a Russian woman named Ms. Romanoff. "I hung on every word that came out of her mouth; her voice sounded how my Eggo syrup tasted," she writes. From there, Kemper picks and chooses choice anecdotes to describe her life, from feckless Ivy League field hockey player to improv workaholic to unsuccessful Saturday Night Live auditioner to cast member on the American version of The Office. What she doesn't include is the typical celebrity tell-all. For the author, the hero's struggle is more Anne Shirley than Lisbeth Salander. Imagining what she will tell her children about her obsession with SoulCycle, she writes, "son, there was a time in my life...when I agreed to pay money to take a bicycle-riding class in a studio lit by candles and filled with songs of Coldplay, Pitbull, and E.S. Posthumus." Everything here is played for laughs, and some setups work better than others. When Kemper sticks the landing, the results are uproarious, as in her encounter with Office creator and star Ricky Gervais, who somehow misunderstood Kemper as saying she played him on the American version of the show.A little Lucille Ball, a little bit Tracy Flick, Kemper proves that good comedy starts with good writing. It's no Bossypants, but it's an entertaining celebrity memoir.

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