The Celebrity Memoir That Made Me Cry

(and laugh) Plus, compost bins and midweek reads.

The little free library near my apartment has a pretty high hit rate. It’s outside of a park and across from a preschool so there’s good foot traffic. I’ve found Mariah Carey’s memoir (love and recommend this podcast episode as a follow up), Elin Hildebrand books and recently Molly Shannon’s memoir, Hello Molly. The Little Free Library is also incredibly voyeuristic, sometimes I see books like “The Mindful Divorce” or “Fatherhood for Dummies” and I hope everyone is doing okay. I also drop books off regularly since I get sent cookbooks regularly and have limited storage space. It’s circular and lovely.

I read Molly Shannon’s book over the course of a few days and cried through the last few chapters, which deal with her father’s death and her becoming a mother. I wasn’t expecting to get so into it—I was in elementary school during her SNL heyday and am not an Irish Catholic from the midwest. Molly’s story is well known—when she was four, her mother, sister, and cousin were killed in a car accident. She, her sister, and her dad, who was driving, tired, and maybe drunk, survived. That’s just the prologue.