Her father cajoled her into outrageous behavior, like stowing away on a flight to New York when she was 13. “He was wild,” Shannon said. “He’d take simple stuff like going into a candy store and be like, ‘Let’s pretend we’re blind,’ asking, ‘Is this chocolate?’”
Yet within their community, Shannon’s father was regarded as a capable (if permissive) parent. Alison Doub, a childhood friend of the author’s, recalled, “In my family, we would say, ‘Jim Shannon’s doing such a wonderful job with those girls.’”
Shannon went on to study at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and perform in student productions, including a comedy revue where she created an early version of her Mary Katherine Gallagher character.
After graduation, Shannon toughed it out in Los Angeles, working as an office temp and a restaurant hostess and occasionally landing appointments with agents by running a scam where she and a friend pretended to work for David Mamet. (According to Shannon, she was only busted once.)
Though Shannon believed her future was in dramatic acting, she landed reliable representation and, eventually, her slot at “S.N.L..”
“I was looking for clients and I couldn’t believe my eyes,” said Steven Levy, who became one of Shannon’s first agents and is now her manager. “She was literally bleeding. Her knees were bleeding and her elbows were dripping blood. When she did Mary Katherine Gallagher, she was so committed that she threw herself into the wall.”
“Hello, Molly!”, which Shannon wrote with Sean Wilsey (“Oh the Glory of It All”), goes on to recount her time at “S.N.L.” She joined the long-running sketch comedy show in 1995, and several of her hit characters — including the unapologetically over-the-hill dancer, Sally O’Malley — were in some way inspired by her father’s theatricality.
Then, as Shannon was preparing to leave “S.N.L.” in 2001, she learned that her father had come out as gay in a phone conversation with Levy. Weeks later, in a private moment when Shannon thought that her father was about to share this with her as well, he instead disclosed that he had prostate cancer.
More weeks went by before Shannon found the courage to ask him: “Have you ever thought you might be gay?”
She writes that her father answered without hesitation, “Most definitely.”
Jim Shannon died in 2002, moments after he had advised Molly to get married and have children and complimented her on her small role in the comedy “Analyze This.”
Molly Shannon, who married the artist Fritz Chesnut in 2004 and has two teenage children, told me she found value in unfurling her personal story from the moment of the accident — a tragedy that dictated the course of her earliest years but which she would not let dominate her life.
“It gives you a resilience,” she said. “You’re able to jump over obstacles. Maybe I wouldn’t have taken that first chance if I hadn’t had those disadvantages.”
Shannon said the crash left her with a sense of loss that she will never fully be able to dispel. “I couldn’t believe that good things could last,” she said.
For example, she said, “When I first started at ‘S.N.L.,’ I didn’t want to hang anything up in my dressing room. I was afraid this might all blow up. I always felt like disaster was right around the corner.”
The writer-director Mike White, who has cast Shannon in projects like “The White Lotus,” “Enlightened” and “Year of the Dog,” said that her book had a candor that is rare in show-business memoirs.
“In a way that’s not didactic or earnest or preachy, she’s giving you the keys to how to live,” White said. “How do you move through loss and turn your life into something beautiful? It made me feel like I need to stop complaining about whatever bumps in the road I’ve experienced.”
