“I’m a person of excess,” the actress and writer tells EW with a laugh.
“As my friend Kulap [Vilaysack] says, I live a celebratory life.
She began thinking more seriously about putting her own pen to paper as the landmark birthday approached.
Credit: Courtesy Casey Wilson
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Can you share the meaning of the book’s title?
Referring to our Starbucks and our Snapples.
It was just the wreckage that I had left behind, and it always stayed with me.
Harper
I thought it was funny and tragic and meaningful and absurd.
How did you eventually come to decide on the specific subject matter of the essays you wrote?
And then there’s the time my dad got a perm after she died.
You know, wide-ranging topics that I feel equally strongly about.
My husband said, “You really seem to be a magnet for the insane and unwell.”
That was really upsetting to process in the wake of my mother’s passing.
It was almost as bad.
Do you keep, or have you kept, a diary?
What’s the story behind the photo on the book’s cover?
I had just started doing the showHappy Endingsand had invited everyone.
The photo is very much candid.
Are you in a bar?
No one was in the back room with me, I was just doing it alone.
I followed it up by “What’s Up?”
by 4 Non Blondes.
What was your writing process for these essays?
Especially since it’s such a different medium than the screenplay.
It coincided with the kicking off of the book.
To be honest, I’d see everybody tapping away and think, I gotta get to it.
I really wrote the whole book at the Jane Club.
June really is a great example she’s kind of the anchoring friendship of my life.
We started our careers together and made many mistakes and I think got very far together.
I only liked like good guys and I was the bad boy, if anything.
I was just terrible with everyone and horrible.
I think I hesitate to say the book is expansive, but it kind of is.
There’s a lot about motherhood and anger and the general wreckage of my life in different areas.
