Emmy Award winning SNL star and Weird Barbie Kate McKinnon can now add novelist to her resume. Her first book, The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette For Young Ladies of Mad Science, is a middle-grade mystery full of oddball characters, creatures and contraptions. The novel, which hit shelves Tuesday, is part of what she calls her “private mission to give a wink and a nod” to young people who might feel “different,” like as she did, growing up.
McKinnon, whose characters and impressions on SNL are legendary, fully admits she was a “weird” kid. She wore a Peter Pan costume to school every day for a year. Later, she dressed like Pippi Longstocking.
“I would go to school in these outfits because I felt more confident ...
and somehow more myself. Go figure,” she told NPR. As a kid, McKinnon shared her room with an array of pets including Madagascar hissing cockroaches and an iguana named Willy.
“It's not something I would do again. And I don't recommend it for anyone,” advised McKinnon. “That said, oh my gosh, we had fun me and that iguana.
And by ‘fun’ I mean we had a contentious relationship that felt like a bad marriage that we'd entered into because one of us was pregnant.” McKinnon says eventually her mom, a social worker, sent the iguana to a reptile rescue organization in Boca. Even though her parents fully supported her eccentricities, McKinnon said she often felt like an outcast among her peers: “I just felt very wrong.
Like, I was not good.