Laraine newman johnny winter6/11/2023 ![]() ![]() I just knew I was fascinated by many things, and I would pursue knowledge about those things to the best of my ability.” Hers is a memoir chock-full of boldface names. She last returned to SNL for its 40th-anniversary special in 2015, where she appeared in a star-studded edition of “The Californians” alongside Bradley Cooper, Taylor Swift, Kerry Washington, and Betty White.Ī through line for Newman in writing the book, she said she “always pursued my interests with absolutely - and I don’t recommend this - no game plan. Since leaving the show in 1980, Newman has worked prolifically as an actor and voice artist in many animated films and TV series, including Pinky and the Brain, Histeria!, The Oblongs, Oswald, and The Goode Family. He returned to the Groundlings to recruit her for his new variety series for NBC, Saturday Night, that same year. Lorne Michaels, then a young producer, caught her act and cast her in The Lily Tomlin Special in 1975, which won an Emmy. She co-founded the Groundlings, the Los Angeles–based improv and sketch-comedy troupe. But when she appeared on the TV show Kids Say the Darndest Things at the age of 4 and got big laughs bantering with host Art Linklater, her career path was assured. ![]() ![]() “Do not go into show business,” Newman’s mother tried to impress upon her daughter. I’m hoping that will sustain and satisfy people in terms of SNL, but what I realized during the course of writing this and reflecting on my life is that I really was witness to a lot of pop-cultural trends, and I dearly hope that people listen to the whole thing because there’s certainly a lot of ripsnortin’ good times after the show.” I liked the idea of celebrating my favorite sketches and found I had the backstories to quite a few of them. I knew I would be responsible for telling what most people would want to hear about the show, and I don’t blame them. “I knew what would be expected of a book like this, she says, “which would be a lot of SNL. She wrote, by her count, about ten drafts over the course of two decades. “I had impressions about myself I wanted to justify, which is no way to write a book.” “The raison d’être for the memoir changed many times,” she said. And by “things,” she’s talking about her own fraught relationship with her mother, bouts of depression, her drug use (she was an addict when she was hired for SNL, she says), and feelings of envy, jealousy, and insecurity that occasionally plagued her during her five-year stint as one of the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players on the long-running NBC sketch show. “I really don’t like memoirs that sugarcoat things,” Newman told Vulture in a recent phone interview. But she hopes they will stay for the chronicle of her formative years and learn how that time shaped and prepared her (or did not prepare her) for becoming a cultural and comedy icon. Laraine Newman expects that listeners of her new audiobook memoir, May You Live in Interesting Times, will come for the stories about Saturday Night Live. ![]()
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