He adores his wife and takes nothing for granted.” We both talk about how much we love our jobs at least five times a day. Only a Parks and Rec fan, for example, will gobble up such revelations as the fact that Nick Offerman (who plays Leslie’s boss, Ron Swanson), “is incredibly professional but also giggly. Much of it, however, is pleasant but banal. It resembles a miscellany or scrapbook, some parts of which are pointed and clever, such as Poehler’s chapter on divorce (she was formerly married to the actor Will Arnett, with whom she has two sons). So perhaps it doesn’t make much sense to review Yes Please as if it were a book like, say, a new Sarah Waters novel or Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Haw k. To judge by Yes Please, she’s a generous person who knows how to have a good time and never stops trying to be a better person. As a cast member of Saturday Night Live and playing the role of Leslie Knope – a chipper, ambitious civil servant from the fictional small town of Pawnee, Iowa – in the terrific sitcom Parks and Recreation, she embodies the possibility of a humour based not on cruelty but on a rueful, shared acknowledgment of human folly. Not that there aren’t many reasons to love Poehler, who manages to be very funny and fundamentally decent at the same time, a vanishingly rare combination in her profession. Whatever you call Yes Please it’s meant for those people who, upon hearing Poehler’s name, exclaim, “Oh, I love her!” It’s hard to imagine anyone making sense of parts of it, let alone wanting to read the whole thing, if they aren’t already familiar with Poehler’s work in film, TV and improv comedy. It’s not a coherent, well-knit piece of writing organised around a central narrative or argument. However, it’s the type of title the publishing business sometimes refers to as a “non-book”, meaning that it has few of the qualities bookish people like to think of as exemplifying the form. Yes Please arrives on printed pages sandwiched between cardboard covers and is currently lodged in the No 2 spot of the New York Times bestsellers list, so technically, yes: it is a book.

But, as gruelling as it is to write a book, it’s still not entirely clear that is what Poehler has done. Grumbling about writing is the main form of exercise engaged in by many authors (hey, it does get the pulse up). “The truth is, writing is hard and boring and occasionally great but usually not.” Her latter point is true the former, not so much. “Authors pretend their stories were always shiny and perfect and just waiting to be written,” she writes. C omedian and actor Amy Poehler spends several pages of her new book complaining about how difficult it is to write a book.

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