Jane Lynch, the snarky Coach Sue Sylvester on Glee, has been quite a busy woman this year. When she wasn’t track-suiting it on the hit Fox show, the 51-year-old actress was busy authoring her new book, Happy Accidents and adjusting to married life.
In her book, Lynch speaks candidly on her attempt to get clean in 1991: “I found myself eating about a gallon of chocolate ice cream daily to replace the copious amounts of sugar my body was used to from my daily beer intake.”
Ice cream was not her only coping vice. Lynch writes that she was so unhappy that she “wanted oblivion” and found it by downing NyQuil each night before bed.
She continued her cough-syrup habit despite having quit her addiction to Miller Lite. Lynch says, “I did, however, continue my habit of taking NyQuil before bed.” She continues, “Though no longer drinking Miller Lite, I was still in need of something to soothe me.
“The fact that NyQuil had alcohol in it was not something I acknowledged at all. I still considered myself on the wagon.”
When Lynch started a role on Broadway in The Real Live Brady Bunch, co-starring Conan O’Brien sidekick Andy Richter, her problems only worsened. “[The show] ran for 10 months at the Village Gate, and I was miserable the whole time,” the actress recalls in the book. “I’d close the drapes of my tiny room, take a swig of NyQuil, toast with a simple ‘Bye-bye,’ and go into a deep sleep.”
Lynch finally ended up in AA after a night of getting high with her Brady Bunch castmates. “I smoked myself into oblivion that night,” she admits. “I still felt like crap and even lonelier than I had felt before.”
Good news for Lynch is she has now found happiness in her new marriage to wife Lara Emby. She says: “I was immediately smitten… I was all the way in, and yes, I had only known her a minute.”
Happy Accidents hits bookstores September 13.