MANY UNDENIABLY SUCCESSFUL writers get cagey when they talk about their work. Consider Lena Dunham's Not That Kind of Girl, which devotes more pages to Dunham's purse than her career as a writer and director, or even Jhumpa Lahiri's statement that she doesn't understand how writing happens. This reluctance to acknowledge effort is strange—it's the literary equivalent of speaking in uptones, or posting on the internet about "a thing I wrote." It's not cute, it's minimizing.

But Amy Poehler is one writer who doesn't care if you think she's nice and effortless, and for this, she is a national treasure. In her new book, Yes Please, she actually says, "I'm not as nice as you think I am," and is forthright about what goes into making a career like hers possible: no shortcuts, no mystique, just work. Poehler also isn't shy about the role personal connections (most forged through the Second City, Upright Citizens Brigade, and ImprovOlympic in Chicago) played in her success. Whether Poehler is recounting her decision to pursue comedy while growing up working-class outside of Boston or playing Hillary Clinton as "this... slightly angry woman who was tired of being the smartest person in the room," Yes Please embodies a saying she and Tina Fey made famous: Bitches get stuff done.

But the real heart of Yes Please is Poehler's life in Chicago, where she studied comedy after graduating from Boston College. She writes in loving detail about performing with the Upright Citizens Brigade, riding her bike to shows while listening to the Beastie Boys, touring with the Second City, and meeting her "comedy wife" Tina Fey, through ImprovOlympic's Charna Halpern, who described Fey to Poehler as "like [you] but with brown hair."

Fey and Poehler would go on to join an improv team called Inside Vladimir, putting them on the path to becoming the first all-female news team on SNL's Weekend Update. "When we are together, we feel strong and powerful," writes Poehler. "Maybe too powerful." Gracious moments like these remind you that while Poehler is not as nice as you think she is, she also has a long history of high-profile collaboration and teamwork, and her loyalty to the people she's worked with is palpable.

Yes Please is a funny, odd book that reads like it can't quite decide if it wants to be a straight-ahead memoir or a parodic scrapbook. Poehler includes haiku about plastic surgery (way funnier than it sounds), blank pages for recording your birth story, titles for books about divorce (smartly, the only section that addresses her divorce from Will Arnett), and a collection of self-portraits as an aerobics instructor, a (male) romance cover model, an old-timey sea captain, and her own high school yearbook portrait from 1989.

Poehler has caught some criticism for Yes Please's goofy structure and unapologetic tone. But while I could've done without the blank pages, I found her candor to be one of the book's strongest elements. As an anxious person, Poehler writes openly about coping mechanisms, irrational fears (robots), and anxiety about writing. Several times, she says the one thing that you're never supposed to say in a book: "Writing is hard." Frank acknowledgment that effort goes into writing? Yes, please!