sure. wait. what?

I BEAT the reading slump by powering through Shonda Rhimes’ memoir Year of Yes. I can’t for the life of me remember how I heard of this book. It just one day appeared on my phone through Libby — a notification said that the book was ready to borrow, causing my forehead to crease right in between my eyebrows, and my brain to go, huh?

But I knew who Shonda Rhimes was, and I do love her shows. When I was a teenager, I stayed up until 5 a.m. bingeing the first two seasons of Grey’s Anatomy. I was supposed to go to bed after season 1, but Addison Shepherd showed up on the season finale and told the doe-eyed Meredith Grey, “and you must be the woman who’s been screwing my husband” — I mean, how can you not keep watching?

So I decided to read Madame Shonda’s memoir, not so much because I was curious about her life, but because I was interested in the lives of the characters she created. Maybe she’d share stories about how the characters came about. Maybe she’d drop some behind-the-scenes goss.

Nope. I was wrong.

The book does mention some of the actors and even has a chapter on Cristina Yang, but Hollywood tea is far from its spotlight. Year of Yes centers on Ma’am Shonda herself and how a comment from her sister yanks her out of her comfort zone, leading to major changes in her life. Shonda shares details about her weight loss, her letting go of toxic friends, her continuous championing of diversity in TV, which she used to do from behind the veils of shows like Grey’s and Scandal and How To Get Away With Murder, but she later ends up becoming more visible at the frontlines — all because she started saying yes.

On one hand, this book can be read as a self-help-slash-case-study for showing that wonderful things can happen if you only start saying “yes” to opportunities that scare you. It sounds trite, yes, but Shonda’s perspective is quite specific: that of a successful and powerful woman of colour. Not only does Shonda encourages saying “yes”, but she also acknowledges the need for community, recognizing that individual successes are never achieved by staying in a silo. Everybody needs help, especially successful working mothers like her.

On the other hand, this book can be taken as a chatty recollection of a woman who has clout and can therefore sell a few million copies of whatever book she writes. The language is casual. The tone, conversational. It reads as if somebody recorded Miss Rhimes talking, transcribed everything she said onto a document, and called it a book. Shonda uses ALL CAPS and repetition for emphasis, and there’s A LOT — and I mean A LOT — of telling, not showing. It was written by a writer for the screens, I guess.

Still, Year of Yes got me out of a slump, so something about it convinced me to stick until the last page. It’s not the language or the style, no. It isn’t an admiration for Miss Shonda or her works either — or maybe it partly is? Maybe it’s the desire, the fantasy, to become someone like Shonda. Someone important. Someone useful. Someone who creates something that is useful. Oh well. Onto the next book!