Without giving too much away, one of the best zingers in the new movie Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (opening Friday [March 4]) comes when Tina Fey has a near-sex experience with, gasp, a Canadian.

“I love that line. I laughed out loud, and it’s true: I did almost sleep with a Canadian,” Kim Barker says in a call to the Straight from Toronto. Presumably remembering what country she’s on the phone to, she quickly adds: “I think that Canadians are probably fine lovers.”

Barker is the author of 2011’s The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a snappy (and much acclaimed) memoir covering her time in the AfPak region as a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. Fey’s movie focuses on Barker’s Afghan escapades beginning in 2003, when the invasion of Iraq knocked the other war off the front page.

Naturally, Robert Carlock’s screenplay takes some heavy liberties with the text—Fey’s character (renamed Kim Baker) is a more cinematically action-friendly TV journalist, and she buddies up with an ambitious and hard-partying colleague played by Margot Robbie—but the essence of Barker’s tale remains.

“It might not be 100-percent nonfiction; it’s Hollywood, but there’s a certain truthiness there. It captures my narrative arc. It captures the absurdity of what it was like to live in that ‘Kabubble’,” she says, referring to Kabul’s adrenalized bedlam of militants, hard-assed military types, and local politicians who could be either pious or horny, depending on the occasion. Not unexpectedly, both the book and the film have drawn comparisons to Catch-22.

“I read Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut when I was really little, probably in junior high,” Barker says. “My parents had me watching M*A*S*H*. The whole idea of being able to blend dark humour with these tragic events just really came naturally. It’s absurd, and that can be funny. The idea of going to the attorney general’s new office and having him show me his bed? That’s just situationally funny. Also, when I came back, man, I just wanted to come up with a way that would make people read about Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Barker’s goal of “demystifying Afghans and Muslims” is arguably best achieved in the portrayal of her translator, which, in turn, provides the film with its most rewarding character, Fahim (played by Girls’ Christopher Abbott, rendered unrecognizable behind a beard and inside a perahan tunban.)

Less encouraging is Carlock’s collaboration (according to the film’s media notes) with the Pentagon and the Department of Defence. Barker offers: “It’s certainly not a pro-war script. I didn’t go watch this movie and think, ‘That seems like things are going really well.’ ” She won’t be drawn, though, on the film’s deliberate fudging of the region’s history, specifically America’s critical support of the mujahedeen in the late ’70s and ’80s.

“I’m a journalist; I’m not gonna talk about politics like that,” says Barker, who was a press fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations before settling into her current job at the New York Times. She adds, “And I was kinda squinting my way through the movie. Most definitely, the U.S. had a role, but I can’t remember what they said in the film,” before signing off with a cheery: “Read the book!”