Girl Walks Into a Bar...

Girl Walks Into a Bar... by Rachel Dratch, 248 pages

You'd probably recognize Rachel Dratch. She was on Saturday Night Live for 12 years (her best-known character was Debbie Downer), and she's appeared as mannish lesbians and goofy old ladies in various movies and TV shows since she left the show in 2011. For the last several years, however, she's been pretty much off the map. In Girl Walks Into a Bar..., Dratch discusses those SNL years and the improv years leading up to them, as well as the few years since.

At the beginning of the book, Dratch explains that this isn't meant as a showbiz memoir and, while she certainly does talk about showbiz for a while at the beginning, she largely sticks to that promise. Instead, this memoir offers insights into Dratch's personal life, with stories about her miserable dating life (including one guy she refers to as The Cannibal) and her unexpected pregnancy at the age of 43.

Dratch does a great job of presenting these everyday stories with a heaping dose of self-effacing humor, while making the reader aware of how, yeah, things are the same for those people on TV (well, as close to "the same" as you can get when a spontaneous trip across the country is nothing to bat an eye at, financially speaking). I listened to the audiobook of this, and I highly recommend it in that format; in fact, I don't know that I'd want to read the actual book, as it doesn't come with Dratch's voice and comedic delivery. Those made the book for me.

Read this if you liked Tina Fey's Bossypants, or if you just can't wait for Amy Poehler's Yes, Please to come out this fall.