The Gleeful Jane Lynch

It’s nerve-racking,being a fan. Long before the cartoonishly malevolent Sue Sylvester terrorised McKinley High on Glee,I was enthralled by Jane Lynch. I stand up to go to the restroom to fix my makeup. The heel comes off my shoe. Rather than hop across the dining room,I sit down again. Finally,Lynch’s coffee arrives. She goes to take a sip and spills it everywhere. “I’m clumsy,” she said.

Now everything is much better. Fittingly,social awkwardness and its consequences are the themes of Lynch’s new memoir,Happy Accidents,which she wrote with Lara Embry,a psychotherapist and her wife for one year. It’s one of those startling and rare celebrity memoirs that manage to be funny and touching and even inspirational. Because it’s about failure and fear as much as it’s about success. Lynch said her extreme social anxiety was fuelled by a sense,from a very early age,that she was not quite as other girls were. An athlete,as compared with her brother,she wished her father would take her to sports events; I’ll be your boy,she thought to herself. When she found out,around the age of 12,what “gay” meant,she was horrified. “I knew instinctively it was a disease and a curse,” she writes.

She was never very good at disguising her unease,but did her best,developing a nasty little drinking habit and a taste for writing earnest angst-ridden songs. She tried on various personas with her clothing,too. In her 20s,she went from propriety and the Peter Pan collars of her teens to what she now calls the homeless cowboy look: “Long underwear with boxer shorts over them. It was delightful.” Eventually,as she became more comfortable in her own skin,she cured the drinking habit with chocolate ice cream,coffee and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings,and her questionable dressing habits with stylists. Lynch has always loved

fashion and is a compulsive shopper with thousands of dollars of clothes in her closet that don’t fit. “When I’m not feeling good about how I look,I figure if I just buy the right piece of clothing,I’ll feel all right,” she said. Feeling good or bad about her body depends on whether she is up or down five pounds. On a woman who is six feet tall. “Go ahead,laugh!” she said. “But it’s true. I wear whoever fits me well. I try to dress the bottom I have. I have the intention of looking fabulous every time. I’m very vain.” Looking at Lynch,I can’t help thinking of something Nora Ephron once said about herself: “One of the few advantages to not being beautiful is that one usually gets better-looking as one gets older; I am,in fact,at this very moment gaining my looks.” (And so it is with Lynch. At 51,she’s a knockout.)

Embry has gone a long way toward helping Lynch with self-acceptance,since she strong-arms Lynch into exercising. Embry has pretty much changed everything for Lynch. They met in 2009 and married last summer,and are now renovating a home with their blended family of pets,and Embry’s 9-year-old daughter,Haden. Lynch is open about her sexuality,yet never expected or wanted to be the beautiful Midwestern face of lesbianism in America. “It’s a generational thing. But to this day,well,like,I’ll see a very fey guy on TV and I’ll be thinking,‘Couldn’t you butch it up a little?’ I want us to make ourselves palatable to the world.” JUDITH NEWMAN