Comedian Amy Poehler opens up in memoir ‘Yes Please,’ but only to a point

TORONTO – In Amy Poehler’s new memoir “Yes Please,” writer friend Alex Baze describes her distinctive laugh as “the sound one hears when running over a raven’s foot with a shopping cart.”

It’s a sound she makes a lot during a recent round of interviews in Toronto, a forceful, jarring and uplifting tone that travels through the walls of a hotel where she’s rat-a-tatting through quick chats with journalists.

To anyone walking the hotel’s halls, it almost sounds like she’s having fun. But this is torture for her, isn’t it?

“No. No, you know what? I mean, no. Yes. No… yes,” she answered with a furious pace and another explosion of laughter. “I’m on a lot of beta blockers, so everything’s fine.”

It’s clear, though, that “Yes Please” represents an uneasy opening up for the previously guarded Poehler.

The 43-year-old star of “Saturday Night Live” and “Baby Mama” wrote the book while shooting “Parks & Recreation” 12 hours a day, raising two children under six, “going through a divorce and producing many projects and falling in love and trying to make appointments for cranial massage.” She included that sentence in a foreward that details how writing a book “nearly killed” her, how it was “awful.” Progress unspooled at such a glacial pace, she mainly worried whether she would finish at all.

As part of her preparation, she read best-selling memoirs by powerful pals Mindy Kaling, Tina Fey and Lena Dunham. Big mistake.

“It was a terrible idea,” said Poehler, clad in a short-sleeved black dress with a white collar poking out underneath. “It’s a nightmare. All I did was distract myself by reading other people’s work and then flinging myself on my bed, like: ‘I’ll never do it.’”

Of the documentation of her struggle, she adds: “I was always drawn to authors who didn’t hide their work, who were into demystifying things, peeking behind the curtain. … I don’t pretend it’s this beautiful golden egg that was delivered to my door.”

That egg, by the way, is cheerfully scrambled: Poehler hops from childhood to Hollywood to motherhood, from self-help to a chapter by Seth Myers, with little concern for chronology.

In a chapter called “Obligatory Drug Stories, or Lessons I Learned on Mushrooms” Poehler dutifully documents the drugs she’s tried and her opinions of each. She doles out sex and divorce advice. She writes briefly and carefully about boyfriend Nick Kroll and ex-husband Will Arnett, but both are kept backgrounded and blurry. Her mom, dad and “Parks & Rec” co-creator Michael Schur all contribute passages or footnotes, with Poehler explaining that she wanted to illustrate qualities in herself she was otherwise struggling to express.

The book is, then, charmingly manic — and as a result nicely captures the eternal energy Poehler radiates in person. Famously friendly, Poehler shares only the celebrity anecdotes that are flattering. Certainly, this is not a tell-all that will earn Poehler any enemies.

“No, I’m not worried. If someone is (mad), that will just make it more exciting,” she said. “I don’t think Antonio Banderas will sue me because I said he smelled good. But if he does? It’ll be the sexiest lawsuit ever.”

If “Yes Please” is hard on anyone, it’s Poehler. One early chapter details her enduring body image issues, with Poehler lamenting her legs, her thin hair and “crazy smile.” She shares that she once dated a male model and, while snooping through his journal, learned that he felt proud for dating someone “funny but not that pretty.”

“Then I went home and cried and took way too long to break up with him,” she writes.

So for someone who struggles with a mirror, what’s it like to stare at her face splashed across a cinema screen?

“It’s really, truly awful,” she replied. “I really hate hate hate it. And it doesn’t get better. It’s not like after you get a thousand pictures taken that you’re like: Now I really start to like how I look or my face. I particularly hate it.

“And I think it just goes to show that most people have this demon voice that lives with them and whispers things in their ear, like: ‘You’re not smart enough or pretty enough or you’re not this or you’re too that.’

“Too often, we try to tell people that they need to get rid of that voice. … But that voice does not go away. It hides in your closet and waits. … Twenty years from now, it’s going to come back and whisper something even meaner. So it’s about coming to terms with that being in your life.”

As revealing as “Yes Please” can be, Poehler draws strict boundaries around her relationship with Ontario-raised Arnett (boundaries that exist in this interview as well), writing: “I don’t want to talk about my divorce because it is too sad and too personal.”

In the book, Poehler plays with the super-sweet perception she’s earned — in part due to signature role as do-gooder civil servant Leslie Knope. And more than anything, releasing “Yes Please” in a way that felt comfortable meant confidently saying no.

“I’m not used to talking about myself,” she said. “I’m actually a pretty private person. So it was a strange exercise to try to be truthful and funny and write a book about myself but still try to be true to what I wanted to share.

“I say in the book that nothing is anybody’s business. And I do kind of believe that.”

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