Hello, Molly! by Molly Shannon

Superstar! Molly Shannon rose to fame as a member of Saturday Night Live for six seasons (1995-2001). Her characters are consistanty great, consistantly Molly, outrageous with a base of humanity easy to relate to. She styled her most famous character, eager Mary Katherine Gallagher, as "the adult child of an alcoholic who always feels like she's in trouble". This says a lot as her father's unbound praise and compulsive dependance takes center stage in her memoir.

In a horrific accident when she was four, her drunken father crashed the family car killing her mother, her teen cousin, and her three year-old sister. Growing up, she became his emotional substitute for her mother, and his parenting swung between stimulating and supportive to consuming and abusive.

When he was motivating, he encouraged her to live life to the fullest - skip school when you want to, shoplift for fun, and - at thirteen - sneak aboard a plane and actually fly to New York for the day. With no boundaries they often took Mystery Trips where anything could happen. That kind of excitement gave stark contrast to the disappointment when he began drinking and didn't know when to stop.

Catching the acting bug in school productions, she worked menial jobs in L.A. for years while she developed her characters in improv shows, until being scouted by SNL and bringing her characters to a wide audience - even making the film Superstar in 1999. Mary Katherine Gallagher is a complex character, blending comedy with pathos. Without fear of looking ridiculous, she has an innocent need for acceptance and if denied, a strength you cannot break - which I think is best expressed in a monologue from the 1979 made-for-tv movie Portrait Of A Stripper, the sad story of a lady who works as a stripper to support her only son, starring Miss Lesley Ann Warren.

After leaving SNL, she continued to give great performances in TV and film, winning a SAG Award and Independant Spirit Award.

This memoir is so much about her father that in promotional press, a main interest was his coming out as gay just before he died. Living life in the closet accounts for the alcoholism, perhaps the competitiveness he had with her girlfriends, and his interest in her handsome male friends. She shares his love of camp and drama and feels he was consumed with jealousy at living a life he did not want.

I read a lot of biographies, and this had a strong message to view life as an adventure. Embrace what happens as a good thing, an exciting chance to experience something you did not plan to do. Bad news can start an interesting path of adventure, so be open to where it leads you.

Anyone interested in Molly Shannon will love this breezy memoir. You will want to adopt her infectious spirit of optimism. She learned it from her dad.

2022 / Hardcover / 304 pages