Not your typical comedienne memoir

Rachel Dratch’s memoir, Girl Walks into a Bar . . ., follows its subtitle exactly: she splits her book into the three sections of Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle.

Comedy Calamities: most of us probably know Dratch from Saturday Night Live, and the occasional “ugly girl” role in a movie. She starts with a hyperbolized call from her agent, in which she’s asked to audition for someone monstrously ugly (and likely a lesbian). She explains that she’s pretty much offered only these roles post-SNL (with a hat tip to Adam Sandler, who keeps her working), then back tracks into how she got started in comedy and ended up on SNL. I liked this part quite a bit: she drops a little SNL gossip, some self-deprecating humor concerning early roles & her parts on 30 Rock and made me chuckle a few times. Then the book veers sharply into her romantic life (or lack thereof)

Dating Disasters contains some funny bad-date stories (“Isn’t telling a girl you just loooooove eating horsemeat one step away from saying you haven’t lived ’til you’ve eaten puppy skewers?”), but mostly just leads into the second focus of her book: her unexpected pregnancy in her early forties. She becomes pregnant after just a few dates into a long-distance relationship that she can barely call a relationship. Having assumed long ago that her life might not necessarily contain marriage and babies, she embraces the pregnancy (after some freaking out) and she and the baby’s father figure out a way to make it work. It’s a sweet story, but just seems wildly different from the first half of the book.

Overall, Girl Walks into a Bar . . . seemed like two cute stories tied together to make one book. Even combined, they only clock in at about 250 pages total. Nothing earth-shattering, but a perfectly fine way to spend an evening.