When I heard that Molly Shannon had written a memoir, I thought, oh, that'll be hilarious. And it was, crammed with all the outlandish childhood and SNL anecdotes you'd expect. But Hello, Molly! is so much more than a punchline. It's ultimately Molly's story of her relationship with her dad. Her mom and baby sister were killed in a car accident. Four-year-old Molly and her older sister were also in the car, and their father was the one driving. I'm going to pause to let that sink in for a moment because it's extraordinarily heavy.
But -- and I cannot stress this enough -- Hello, Molly! isn't a downer. It's the bittersweet, clean kind of sad that makes you appreciate life and remember that everything happens for a reason. Like This is Us, plus comedy. In other words, it has a good tone (and you know how much I value that). Molly describes the highs and lows of life with her dad -- and her struggles to make it in showbiz -- with the straight-from-the-heart candor of a coming-of-age novelist. She always sees the best in everything, even when audition doors are slammed in her face and her father acts more like a child. Because it all really happened -- and made Molly the lovable, no-holds-barred performer we know today -- it's much more engaging than fiction.
Of course, you can't talk about Molly Shannon without mentioning Mary Katherine Gallagher. Or, as Shannon calls her, MKG (not to be confused with that other Irish icon, Machine Gun Kelly). Shannon created the character while she was at NYU, almost a decade before she crashed into Studio 8H at SNL. And it turns out that everyone's favorite painfully earnest, awkward Irish Catholic teen is based on Shannon herself. Shannon joined SNL in 1995, so I remember the MKG years vividly. And the sketch that stayed with me the most is the one where she's reenacting a scene from A House Without a Christmas Tree. Not only is it cringeworthily funny, it's heartbreaking, showing Mary Katherine at her most vulnerable, reminding you that she's just a kid from a dysfunctional family who wants the world to love her. After learning about her life, it rings even truer.
Raw and sweet and hysterical, Hello, Molly! is an American tale (and no, not like when Fievel goes west; although, on second thought, maybe?). It embodies timeless themes that readers hold dear: Midwestern girl makes good, optimism in the face of incredible odds, and an unorthodox but unbreakable father-daughter bond. It's universal, its magic extending far beyond SNL. At the end, I felt like hers was a life well lived (not that it's over yet!), brimming with love and adventure.
No doubt about it, she's a Superstar.