Cecily Strong – Crying and Laughing

Comedy and sorrow play equal roles in SNL’s Cecily Strong’s memoir This Will All Be Over Soon

- By H. Alan Scott

THERE ISN’T THAT MUCH distance between funny and sad. As Saturday Night Live’s Cecily Strong says, “When people talk about comedy, you talk about tension. It’s one in the same.”

Take for example, Strong’s own life during 2020. First there was shooting SNL during the pandemic. Then it was figuring out how to safely film her new Apple TV+ musical comedy series Schmigadoon! At the same time, amid waves of anxiety and depression, Strong was grappling with having to put a new relationship on hold over a COVID-19 diagnosis and the death of her beloved 30-year-old cousin, Owen Strong, from brain cancer.

“My cousin just passed away and the guy I finally started dating gets COVID. I had this busted thermometer, and I’m like, ‘Am I gonna die? Is he gonna die?’ That’s over two weeks!”

Strong writes about it all in her new memoir This Will All Be Over Soon, set for release August 10 by Simon & Schuster. “It was such a weirdly personal thing to write this, and I didn’t quite know what it would ever turn out to be. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to write about Owen in the first place. How can I find the right words to explain something that’s so devastating and so full of love?”

Strong says she and her cousin had been close as kids but had since lost touch. “When I came to New York for SNL, Owen met me the night of my audition. I was like, ‘Who are you even? I don’t even know you as an adult.’”