By Randee Dawn
Between her headline-making appearance hosting the Emmy Awards on Sunday and her regular role on Fox's "Glee" and the publication of her new memoir "Happy Accidents," Jane Lynch is just busting out all over.
"Everything, it's so funny, it just seems to happen in like one week -- and it has been that kind of week for me, and I almost can't take stock of it," she told TODAY's Lester Holt.
Jane Lynch, America's favorite villain on the hit show "Glee," takes TODAY on a tour of the set and talks about hosting the 63rd Emmy Awards.
Lynch admitted she hadn't even read any reviews of her appearance as Emmy host.
"I basically jumped on a plane to get here," she said, referring to the TODAY show set -- but said preparing for the slot was not easy.
"You can't think about it, you really just have to take it a chunk at a time. I have the gall to have to compare it to playing 'Hamlet,'" she said. "If you take it a soliloquy at a time, a speech at a time, you take the chunks, which is exactly what I did with the Emmys. And those thoughts of what if I trip, what if the prompter goes down, what if, what if, what if -- those would wake me up in the middle of the night, and I would scream aloud, but mostly for the waking hours I was able to take it one chunk at a time."
Still, it was Lynch's deeper past that proved most interesting, a subject she explored in her book "Happy Accidents."
Growing up, Lynch said "I didn't feel comfortable in my person. I was so sure there was some other place I was supposed to be, some other family I was supposed to be (in) -- 'The Brady Bunch' -- some other body I belonged in, and unfortunately I was stuck with the one I was in, and it gave me a lot of heartache and a lot of wishing I was someone else.
She also had a hard time acknowledging her sexual orientation publicly, and redirected her passions early on to, for example, "Happy Days"-era Ron Howard.
"Post-puberty Ronny Howard," she clarified to Holt. "Ronny Howard, like Davy Jones, like Donny Osmond ... they're non-threatening sexual man. They're kind of boyish, they don't have any hair on their bodies ... they're these non-threatening boy-man figures, Ken doll figures."
Lynch came out to her family in a letter when she was 32, after a woman in she met in an AA meeting suggested she pour out her heart in writing, but not necessarily send the note. When she finished, it choked her up to read the words aloud, and she she sent the letter to her loved ones. "It was great," she said.
Lynch married Dr. Laura Embry in 2010.
Today, though, Lynch said she's in a much better place, particularly playing Sue Sylvester on "Glee." "She says all those things in the back of our head we'd never entertain saying. ... I had this thing where I would take everybody else's inventory. I was telling everyone how they should live their life. I didn't hold back. ... I didn't get a lot of love for that, and what I wanted was a lot of love."
Presumably, these days she has even more than she can handle.
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