Molly Shannon's Hello Molly! is the rare celebrity memoir that captivates

TIME

"Shannon offers a sort of advice from time to time, a philosophy of hard work but also talking to everyone, making connections, and not being afraid to come up with absurd schemes," says Lynn Steger Strong of Hello Molly!: A Memoir, which was released Tuesday. "If I were to pull out any of the platitudes that she offers from the text, I’m not sure they’d feel like much. But they do work, within the context of her story, because it’s so clear throughout all these pages that Shannon actually means these things. Like the way she threw her body through the wall those years on SNL, the way she always seems to inhabit her characters with her entire self, to feel fully possessed by whatever it is she’s tasked to do or wants to be."

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• Molly Shannon says the car crash she survived at age 4 that killed her mom, little sister and cousin gave her resilience, but also left her with a loss she couldn't dispel: “When I first started at SNL, I didn’t want to hang anything up in my dressing room. I was afraid this might all blow up," she says. "I always felt like disaster was right around the corner.” Shannon adds that experiencing tragedy early on "gives you a resilience. You’re able to jump over obstacles. Maybe I wouldn’t have taken that first chance if I hadn’t had those disadvantages.”
• Shannon recalls convincing Whitney Houston to appear in an SNL Mary Katherine Gallagher sketch: "Sometimes I would see where they would approach the musical guest and they would have too many lines or it's too confusing," Shannon tells Howard Stern. "And I thought, They don't want to have all of this pressure memorizing these lines. So I just told Whitney, 'Look, I'm going to play the Catholic school girl. You're going to be like a snotty girl. All you have to do is, just do whatever you want. You just have to be snotty, push in front me, out-sing me. You can say whatever you want."
• Shannon ended up with a small part on Twin Peaks by pretending to work for playwright David Mamet