I received My Squirrel Days from the lovely emmalita during our Cannonball gift exchange. I was very excited because my library did not have Kimmy Schmidt’s Ellie Kemper’s memoir available to borrow and I must read all memoirs written by people with more than 50,000 Twitter followers (edit: apparently Ellie doesn’t have a Twitter but she has 546k Instagram followers so the sentiment is the same).
There comes a time in every sitcom actress’s life when she is faced with the prospect of writing a book. When my number was up, I told myself that I would not blink. I would fulfill my duty as an upbeat actress under contract on a television series and serve my country in the only way I knew how. I would cull from my life the very greatest and most memorable of anecdotes, I would draw on formative lessons learned both early on and also not too long ago, I would paint for the reader a portrait of the girl, the teenager, the woman I am today, and I would not falter. I would write a book.
Despite coming up through the Upright Citizen’s Brigade where she wrote her own one woman show Kemper’s not a very talented writer, which is disappointing, but what she lacks in skill she makes up for with enthusiasm. I absolutely loved the first season of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and while the subsequent seasons have failed to live up to the bottled magic of those first thirteen episodes I can’t deny that Ellie’s Kimmy makes me smile (not as much as Titus Andromedon but few people can). Also, after reading My Squirrel Days I can laugh a little harder at the Tristafé episode.
Ellie has lived a very blessed life which unfortunately doesn’t make for a particularly interesting life, especially when you’re writing a book. She grew up in an upper middle class St Louis home and went to college at Princeton where she warmed the bench on their field hockey team before discovering improv. She was lucky enough to have financial support from her family while she explored comedy as a profession before landing the role of Erin on The Office right as it began its creative decline. I do wonder if Ellie, who wanted to write a book before having a kid then wrote Squirrel Days two years after he son was born, jumped the gun and perhaps needed to live just a little bit longer before commit her life’s story to paper.
