After playing Weird Barbie, Kate McKinnon’s new children’s book also celebrates being uniquely you

By Alicia Rancilio, The Associated Press on October 1, 2024.

FILE - Kate McKinnon arrives at the 74th Primetime Emmy Awards on Monday, Sept. 12, 2022, at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles. (Photo by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File)

If you find it odd that Kate McKinnon chose her first book to be for middle-grade kids, the former “Saturday Night Live” star says, think again.

“I find sketch comedy and middle school to be very similar,” she said recently over Zoom. “There can be an unabashed silliness in middle grade that I have found only in sketch comedy.”

“The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science,” now available, follows the three Porch sisters, Gertrude, Eugenia, and Dee-Dee, who feel that they don’t fit in their hoity-toity town. They live with their snooty aunt and uncle and equally snooty seven cousins – all named Lavinia. When the Porch girls are kicked out of school, they find a new mentor in an outrageous scientist with worms in her hair named Millicent Quibb.

In a Q&A, McKinnon spoke about her childhood and “The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science,” which she wrote mostly from her bed. “I ended up staying in bed for a year, basically,” she laughed. The plan is that this is book No. 1 in a series.

Answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.

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AP: Some themes in this book are about identity. It would be fitting if you wrote this while filming “Barbie.” Did you?

MCKINNON: I started writing this before “SNL,” and worked on it throughout, whenever I had a moment, and picked it right back up after I left. I like weirdos. I am a weirdo. I like playing weirdos, and I like reaching out to fellow weirdos. And this was just another venue for doing that.

AP: What was it like going from the hectic, repetitive pace of “SNL” to writing fulltime?

MCKINNON: I was surprised by how much it felt like performing. I felt like I was improvising. It felt like sitting in a room and writing a sketch for “SNL,” but then you just have a lot more time to revise. I absolutely love it. I’m an introvert, so writing by myself does not bother me. As much as I miss my colleagues, it suits me in some way.

AP: In the book, the Porch sisters find a true mentor in Millicent who encourages them to be who and how they want. Who was your Millicent growing up?

MCKINNON: I had parents who celebrated my weird, little activities and let me take the clamshells home when we had linguine and clams at a restaurant. They bought me little archeological kits and just really fostered whatever esoteric interest I had. I also had teachers who helped me and supported me. Sometimes a magical adult swoops in and fosters the gifts you were born with that other people are telling you are bad.

AP: The book is silly and funny. Did you ever make yourself laugh while writing?

MCKINNON: I do. I enjoy names. I think funny names are a whole art in and of itself. I was proud of the names I came up with.

AP: Talk about narrating the audiobook.

MCKINNON: That was some of the most labor-intensive performing I’ve ever done. I’ve done plenty of voice overs, but you’re doing every line. When writing, the first thing I had to do was come up with voices for all of the characters. With anything I’m like, “˜What’s the voice?’ I have to start with that. Then you decide the hair and the clothes and that’s all you need to know. I knew what all of the characters sounded like going in.

AP: Will you go on a book tour and meet your readers?

MCKINNON: I am going on a cross-country trek and I am so beyond excited. At 12, I was getting messages from the culture and from some of my peers that I was not OK the way I was. To have someone look at you and say, “Hey, the thing that you think is weird about you, that’s actually what’s going to save you as a grown up. And that’s actually what’s going to help the world-at-large.” To give that to someone else would be the honor of my life.