“I’ve gotten good at making stuff up,” Shonda Rhimes tells you early in her new book, Year of Yes: How to Dance it Out, Stand in the Sun, and Be Your Own Person. “I could lie in the Olympics.” She’s right, of course, and her blooming cherry orchard of wildly successful television shows – “Hell, I don’t own Thursday nights for nothing,” as she points out – stands as proof behind her. It’s still a bit of a weird thing to admit though, so early in a memoir.

Well, revise that: Year of Yes isn’t a memoir, not exactly – it’s something more on the order of self-help, or of a collection of motivational talks, or else the appealing blog of a very intelligent person who has done extremely interesting things with her life about which any self-respecting person has to be somewhat curious. And before anyone lifts a picket sign about Hollywood fakery, let me point out that any intelligent person reading a book such as Rhimes’s can see between the lines. And she gives you plenty to work with.

For example: this is a book the publisher has billed as a paean to self-confidence, but it actually runs on a motor of anxiety. It’s written loose and fast and bloggy. There are a lot of one-sentence paragraphs, and one-word sentences. That is not to say it’s badly written – it’s only when Rhimes decides to commit to her self-help conceit that she goes off into flights of fancy about “badassery”. But for most of the book she’s not doing that; instead she is issuing a State of the Rhimes speech punctuated by undeniably memorable turns of phrase like: “My marrow is introvert marrow. My snot is introvert snot.”

Snot comes up a lot, as it happens. It is actually a pretty good image to work with here, because it evokes the surprising, unavoidable humiliation and fear that accompanied Rhimes’s success. This is a book in which interviews and panel discussions are anxious disasters, clothes don’t fit, and friends ask for astronomical amounts of money from Rhimes and then scream when they don’t get it. These elements are far more interesting, in their own way, than the ones around the book is structured, the “yes” moments, which tend to be about saying yes to things such as Oprah interviews. These are important moments for any person in public life, to be sure, and no one wants to diminish those accomplishments particularly because Rhimes is what she herself calls a “First Only Different”.

But if I had to pick moments in the book where it felt like Rhimes was really levelling with her reader, among them would be this one, which comes just before she visits the White House:

Where I consider licking the dust at the bottom of the Xanax bottle because oh yeah, I don’t take Xanax anymore, it’s been 12 years since Xanax was my friend. Yuck, this Xanax dust is 12-year-old Xanax dust?

Or this one, which comes when she decides not to marry a longtime boyfriend because she knows how he would interfere with her work. For her, she says, getting to a place where she can write takes distance from the world, from its “brownies and cupcakes and episodes of Game of Thrones”:

Every time I sit down to write, I have to mentally run those five miles past all of that to get to that door. It’s a long, hard five-mile run. Sometimes I am almost dead by the time I reach the door. That’s why I have to keep doing it.

This kind of thing feels incredibly refreshing. We live in an age where successful women are being celebrated and lionised – and thank God for that – but often as not it happens in a flat way. They’re called “badasses”, or “rock stars”. They are celebrated in gifs and retweets. Increasingly I think this is the model of adult life that is being impressed on young women, one in which any kind of ambivalence or doubt is subsumed to this narrative of being a superstar in whatever line of work they choose.

Rhimes’s shows have never been much for that flat kind of “empowerment” anyway. That’s particularly true in Grey’s Anatomy, where the central character, Meredith Grey, is never quite sure about anything she’s doing. But Rhimes admits she created the character she feels closest to personally – Cristina Yang – in order to make her an embodiment “my dreams”. This, though, she admits, made Cristina into a kind of fantasy character. But, Rhimes writes:

I wanted us to watch and admire a woman who did not want the things we have all been told we are supposed to want. I wanted us to befriend a woman who was busy throwing out the fairy tale and writing her own story.

And as she – perhaps sometimes inadvertently – shows in this book, that requires a lot more blood, sweat, tears and Xanax dust than Rhimes has ever been able to show on television.