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American actress Molly Shannon recently opened up about living through a family tragedy and how it shaped her personally and professionally.
In her new memoir, titled Hello, Molly!, the 57-year-old comedian discussed the time her mother, younger sister, and cousin were killed in a car accident caused by her father driving under the influence, who was also gravely injured.
While talking about the incident in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, The White Lotus star revealed that she was just four years old when the tragedy happened and coping was extremely difficult.
"I was very heartbroken and very sad and just trying to hold it all together as a kid. There's no way you could feel that type of deep pain about your mother and your sister being dead, so you just hold it all in, and it comes up later in life."
Shannon and her surviving sister went to live with an aunt after the accident while her father recovered. She dealt with the emotions associated with the loss of her family members during her stay there.
What happened to Molly Shannon's family in the accident?
In an excerpt obtained by People Magazine from Molly Shannon's new memoir, Hello, Molly!, the actress recalled the 1968 car accident.
The book mentions that Molly, aged four at the time, lost her mother, her 3-year-old sister Katie and cousin Fran to the tragedy. Her father was bringing the family home in an intoxicated state after a daylong party when he sideswiped a car on the highway and then veered into a steel light post.
Shannon, her father, and her 6-year-old sister Mary survived, but the physical and emotional wounds caused by the accident lingered for years. She writes in the memoir,
"The car was mangled badly on impact. A man passing the scene stopped. My mother was lying on the ground beside our car and she asked him, 'Where are my girls?' She wanted to gather her three little girls and she couldn't. Her heart must have broken in that moment. And those were her final words."
Her sister Katie and cousin Fran died on the spot. Shannon and her other sister Mary survived as they were sitting in the very back of the station wagon, but they suffered concussions and serious injuries. Katie, however, was "buried in the wreckage."
Shannon's father was heavily injured in the accident and had to learn to walk again. He grappled with remorse and the difficulties of being a single father to two young kids for years to come.
Molly Shannon says that the accident led her to perform in front of the public
The Other Two actress reveals in the memoir that she had learned to make people laugh while growing up. She enrolled at New York University in 1983 where she pursued drama, but had to work as a waitress to pay for her college tuition.
In 1986, Shannon donned the Catholic-schoolgirl persona of Mary Katherine Gallagher for the first time during an improv audition. She writes,
"I was doing the character as a very nervous person — an exaggerated version of myself and how I felt."
Shannon's friends suggested that she should be on Saturday Night Live, even though she was concentrating on serious acting at that moment.
Shannon, however, made her friends proud with her SNL debut in 1995 and she subsequently rose to prominence.
Molly Shannon's Hello, Molly! is now available for purchase.
