FRESH AIR

Tina Fey grew up in a household with parents she has described as “Goldwater Republicans with pre-Norman Lear racial attitudes.” But, she says, her parents were always supportive of her career, even when she told them she was moving to Chicago to start a career in improv. “To their credit, they never said, ‘You like entertainment. Are you sure you don’t want to be an entertainment lawyer?’ ” she tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “[They understood] me wanting to pursue this before I had commitments, before I had a family. And I think they knew that neither my brother nor I would ever come back to them destitute.” Fey grew up to become Saturday Night Live‘s first female head writer as well as the star and executive producer of NBC’s sitcom 30 Rock. Now, she’s also a published author. Her new memoir Bossypants contains her thoughts on juggling her roles as actor, daughter, mother, writer and boss on the sets of both SNL and 30 Rock. MORE

TINA FEY: The idea of the photo shoot is something like my wild night out. The irony being that I don’t do that. I got an e-mail [from Esquire] with a list of the potential setups, and my e-mail back was like, Well, I need to decline being handcuffed to a bed. I won’t straddle anyone. I won’t make out with a cop. There are certain things, I totally get them as a premise. And they’re all good fun, and if I were a young single model, they would be appropriate, but, you know, I’m a mom. And my kid’s going to find this someday. I don’t want to be handcuffed to a bed in Esquire. MORE