Molly Shannon didn’t shy away from throwing herself onto a pile of metal chairs as overzealous Catholic schoolgirl Mary Katherine Gallagher, who yearned to be a “superstar” on “Saturday Night Live.” In real life, too, Shannon isn’t afraid to be serious.
“I feel like it’s almost more exhausting being ‘on’ all the time than doing talk shows where you have to tell these funny anecdotes,” says Shannon in an interview about her new book, Hello, Molly! (Ecco, 304 pp., available now).
“I like being serious and real,” says Shannon. “As my friend John C. Reilly says, ‘You can be dead serious.’ I think some comedians push people away, but I don’t like that. I like feeling close and connecting with people and sharing things to connect.”
“Hello, Molly!” begins with a car accident in the summer of 1969 that killed Shannon’s mother, Peggy Keating, her 25-year-old cousin, Fran, and her 3-year-old sister, Katie. Shannon Was Fair 4. Her father, Jim Shannon, who had been drinking at the celebration of a family member’s high school graduation day, drove the two hours home.
“There’s no way of knowing exactly what happened that night, although my gut tells me he fell asleep at the wheel,” writes Shannon, now 57. “But would he have fallen asleep without the drinking? It still keeps me up at night sometimes, but in the end all that matters is that it changed our lives forever.”
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Actress Molly Shannon’s memoir Hello, Molly! is available now.
Shannon tells USA TODAY that writing the book made her “dig deep.” She looked at the crash site on Google Maps for the first time.
“I just never wanted to think about it,” she says. “People say, ‘Oh, was (writing the memoir) cathartic?’ And I was like, ‘No, I’ve processed so much of that stuff in therapy.’ But honestly, yes, that was cathartic! I never knew my dad had driven 90 minutes and we were 18 minutes from home. That was heartbreaking to discover.”
The story goes on
In her memoir, Shannon recalls the first time she got a group laughing — by announcing to a friend’s mother who served chicken cacciatore that she “would have the chicken, but I don’t want any of the cacciatore.” She documents the time she spent at NYU developing her craft, the origins of acclaimed “SNL” characters Mary Katherine Gallagher and Sally O’Malley. From her personal life, she shares the story of meeting her nearly 18-year-old boyfriend -year-old husband, artist Fritz Chesnut, and how she made a towed car adventure for their children Stella Shannon Chesnut and Nolan Shannon Chesnut, who are now 18 and 17 respectively.
Shannon also writes about her relationship with her father, a man who had his flaws – he could be short-tempered and struggled with alcoholism – but whom she adored with all her heart. He came out to his daughter in 2001, just months before he died in 2002.
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“He was really like my biggest supporter,” says Molly Shannon. “He said, ‘Listen, you walk into these offices of these agents and Hollywood execs and you just say, ‘Hey! Hold the phone! I have talent!’ And then he said, ‘And use your singing voice.’ That was his advice.”
Shannon made her “SNL” debut in 1995 and stayed for six seasons. But the success she enjoyed on NBC’s sketch show also brought sadness for a time.
“I was driven to achieve, achieve, achieve,” she says, “and I ran and worked so hard on my show, trying to make it, make it, make it and then finally when I… came to ‘SNL’ and I pick up Mary Katherine and people (yell) ‘Molly!’ They know my name and come up to me on the street. I went into depression for a few months because I was like, ‘The only person I really want to tell that I’m good and say that she’s proud of me is my mom, and that won’t bring her back. ‘”
The realization gave Shannon the freedom to enjoy her work without feeling the need to be on top. “You can just enjoy being creative, living as an artist, doing what you love, following your passions,” she says. “It gave me a very healthy perspective on fame and what it means, and I carry that with me to this day.”
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Shannon decided to leave “SNL” not to follow in the footsteps of those who used it as a career launch pad, but to focus on her personal life.
“I was so happy that I had come this far that I could have stopped there,” she says. “I could have freeze myself and be happy for life and go back to working in restaurants. It far exceeded my expectations, so I thought, ‘A stepping stone?’ I never saw it that way. I thought, ‘This is the greatest job in show business!’”
Adds Shannon, “I knew I always wanted to have children because I lost my mother. I wanted to get married.”
Years later, Shannon’s desire to immerse herself in motherhood motivates her to keep her workload manageable. She stars alongside Vanessa Bayer and Jenifer Lewis in Showtime’s I Love That for You, which debuts April 29, in which she plays a home shopping network’s top seller. Shannon also appears as a popular talk show host and mother on HBO Max’s “The Other Two.”
“My kids are teenagers and I really want to enjoy that time because I feel like I’ll never get them back,” says Shannon. “So actually I don’t want to do that much and I don’t want to go out that much. I just want to be there and enjoy my kids before they go to college.”
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Molly Shannon says ‘SNL’ is the biggest job in show business