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 ST.
LOUIS — Writers are often told to write like their
parents are dead.
Ellie
Kemper does not believe in that. Her parents, David and
Dotty Kemper of Ladue, Mo., are very much alive, and in
her first book of autobiographical essays, “My
Squirrel Days,” the actress included nothing that
might shock or upset them.
Kemper,
38, is famously nice, polite and upbeat. As the title
character in “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” the
hapless receptionist Erin in “The Office” and the
bridesmaid Becca in “Bridesmaids,” she was
essentially playing exaggerated versions of her perky
and cheerful self.
“They’re
all sort of similar to me. That is something that I
enjoy, because I think I know my strengths as an actor,
and I like playing them up,” she said by phone from
her home in New York.
“I’m
not worried about being typecast, (but) I think it would
be fun playing something the opposite of what I’ve had
experience playing. Something with a little bit more
edge would be fun to play.”
The 1998
John Burroughs High School grad comes back to town a few
times a year, and every time she tries to do some of her
favorite things, “most of them food-related.” She
gets the BLT from PJ’s Tavern in Kirkwood, a chicken
dish from House of India in University City, a chicken
salad sandwich (Chuck’s No. 39) from Companion Bakery
“and of course I love going to Ted Drewes,” she
said.
Ice cream
is something of an obsession for Kemper, a theme she
touches on briefly and humorously in her book. While
acknowledging Ben & Jerry’s Tonight Dough flavor
as a longtime love, her current favorite has St. Louis
roots. It is Ooey Gooey Butter Cake, from New York’s
Ample Hills Creamerie.
“It’s
delicious. You can honestly have four bites and be
satisfied,” she said.
Kemper
was an English major at Princeton; before becoming a TV
star, she wrote humorous headlines for the Onion
(“Grapes ‘big hit’ at area picnic,” “Dog in
purse stares longingly at dog in yard”) and satirical
stories for McSweeney’s (“Some relatively recent
college grads discuss their maids” and even
“Following my creative writing teacher’s advice to
‘Write like your parents are dead’”).
So
writing a collection of essays was something she had
wanted to do for a long time. When she learned she was
pregnant, “it was a deadline. I thought if I didn’t
pitch a book now I would never do it,” she said.
She
signed with Simon & Schuster one month before giving
birth to her son, James, who is now 2. She laughs at the
thought that she could write the essays before the baby
arrived.
“I
struggled with the structure, because I wanted to
sprinkle fiction in there,” she said. “As I wrote
it, I realized that wasn’t going to work. Anything
that I wrote that was more absurd didn’t fit with the
more serious things in there.”
The book
is a collection of more than two dozen short essays,
assembled more or less chronologically, about certain
incidents in her life. Taken collectively, they reveal
her personality, history and character without becoming
bogged down in specifics.
It is a
memoir, but an unusual kind. One essay describes how
much a beloved second-grade student teacher — and
especially the stuffed walrus the teacher gave her for
her birthday — have meant to her. One describes the
way her athletic abilities, which were good for high
school, were not quite good enough for college. More
than one discuss her devotion to SoulCycle, a chain of
stationary-bike gyms that combine exercise with a
vaguely New Age devotion to self.
She
writes without embarrassment about the way she loses
control of her bladder when she laughs very hard, which
has happened to her since she was a child.
“To me,
that is as natural as a sunset. Because I have been
doing it so long, I mentioned it,” she said.
And in
one essay, titled “Slob,” she admits to not always
washing her hands after she uses the bathroom in her own
home. She admitted to having writer’s remorse about
including that detail, not the least because, yes, her
parents will read it.
But she
is unrepentant about not washing her hands. “They’re
not dirty,” she said.
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