In the summer of 1974, a fourteen-year-old girl in Dolton, Illinois, had a dream. A dream to become an actress, like her idols Ron Howard and Vicki Lawrence. But it was a long way from the South Side of Chicago to Hollywood, and it didn’t help that she’d recently dropped out of the school play, The Ugly Duckling. Or that the Hollywood casting directors she wrote to replied that “professional training was a requirement.” But the funny thing is, it all came true. Through a series of Happy Accidents, Jane Lynch created an improbable—and hilarious—path to success. In those early years, despite her dreams, she was also consumed with anxiety, feeling out of place in both her body and her family. To deal with her worries about her sexuality, she escaped in positive ways—such as joining a high school chorus not unlike the one in Glee—but also found destructive outlets. She started drinking almost every night her freshman year of high school and developed a mean and judgmental streak that turned her into a real-life Sue Sylvester. Then, at thirty-one, she started to get her life together. She was finally able to embrace her sexuality, come out to her parents, and quit drinking for good. Soon after, a Frosted Flakes commercial and a chance meeting in a coffee shop led to a role in the Christopher Guest movie Best in Show, which helped her get cast in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Similar coincidences and chance meetings led to roles in movies starring Will Ferrell, Paul Rudd, and even Meryl Streep in 2009’s Julie &amp; Julia. Then, of course, came the two lucky accidents that truly changed her life. Getting lost in a hotel led to an introduction to her future wife, Lara. Then, a series she’d signed up for abruptly got canceled, making it possible for her to take the role of Sue Sylvester in Glee, which made her a megastar. Today, Jane Lynch has finally found the contentment she thought she’d never have. Part comic memoir and part inspirational narrative, this is a book equally for the rabid Glee fan and for anyone who needs a new perspective on life, love, and success.THIS PROGRAM IS ENHANCED WITH PHOTOS FROM THE HARDCOVER EDITION OF THE BOOK. READ BY THE AUTHOR WITH A FOREWORD WRITTEN AND READ BY CAROL BURNETT Excerpt from Happy Accidents: If I could go back in time and talk to my twenty-year-old self, the first thing I would say is: “Lose the perm.” Secondly I would say: “Relax. Really. Just relax. Don’t sweat it.” I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t anxious and fearful that the parade would pass me by. And I was sure there was someone or something outside of myself with all the answers. I had a driving, anxiety-filled ambition. I wanted to be a working actor so badly. I wanted to belong and feel like I was valued and seen. Well, now I am a working actor, and I guarantee you it’s not because I suffered or worried over it. As I look back, the road to where I am today has been a series of happy accidents I was either smart or stupid enough to take advantage of. I thought I had to have a plan, a strategy. Turns out I just had to be ready and willing to take chances, look at what’s right in front of me, and put my heart into everything I do. All that anxiety and fear didn’t help, nor did it fuel anything useful. My final piece of advice to twenty-year-old me: Be easy on your sweet self. And don’t drink Miller Lite tall boys in the morning.

Happy Accidents

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Hyperion Audio

Transform Your Body, Transform Your Life! Each season, millions of viewers tune in to see Chris Powell lead extraordinary transformations on ABC's breakout hit Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss Edition. Now, building on the basic weight-loss philosophy introduced in his bestselling book Choose to Lose, Chris has created a transformation plan anyone can follow--one that recognizes that no weight-loss journey is the same, and that more options mean longer-lasting results. At the center of Chris Powell's Choose More, Lose More for Life is Chris's carb-cycling plan, which kicks your metabolism into full gear by alternating between low- and high-carb days. Never carb-cycled before? No problem. Powell provides all the information you need to get started and see immediate results. Been carb-cycling but need to shake things up? This book provides four different cycles--Easy, Classic, Turbo, and Fit--to help you find a plan that fits you. Chris also understands that weight loss plateaus when we get bored. So in this book, he focuses on choices--including more than twenty new workouts called Nine-Minute Missions--that pack maximum results into minimal time. He also offers more delicious and easy recipes to keep you eating well, more tracking logs to keep you motivated, and more success stories to inspire you as you write your own--one that lasts for the rest of your life! "If you want results--if you want to lose that weight and transform your life-you need to stop thinking about it and get going! You hold in your hand the map to an incredible path to success, and I'll be right beside you 100 percent, cheering you all the way to your finish line. You're choosing to make a healthy change, and I'm choosing you. It's going to be a wonderful journey for both of us!" - Shape Your Body in Just Nine Minutes Each Day - Find a Carb Cycle That&rsquo;s Made for You - Build in Cheat Days to Enjoy Foods You Love - Eat Carbs to Lose Weight - Transform Your Body, One Success at a Time

Choose More, Lose More for Life

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Powell, Chris

Diets & Weight Loss

In the bestselling tradition of The Devil Wears Prada, real-life publicist Rachel Pine's debut novel, The Twins of Tribeca, perfectly captures the tantrums, whims, follies, neuroses, and unimaginable egos that seem almost too outrageous to be true. But that's show biz. Karen Jacobs has landed the job of a lifetime at New York's hottest boutique film studio, High Art Pictures, which is headed by a set of famously competitive and ambitious brothers, Phil and Tony Waxman, the highbrow, publicity-hungry sharks who love to promote, promote, promote. Karen works in the company's most intense division-the hyper-heated publicity department, so she is perfectly situated to see how it all happens: the brothers''moving meetings' that rotate staff in and out of limos on the way to the airport; the catering to a celebrity's every (psychotic) whim;working on the Academy for those all-important nominations. On her first big night working as a celebrity greeter at a premiere, her neurotic, hard-driving boss tells her: 'Don't move your hands when you greet people. They might think you're trying to touch them.'

The Twins Of Tribeca: A Novel

Pine, Rachel

Literature & Fiction

Plum Sykes burst on to the literary scene in 2004 with her beguiling debut novelintroducing readers to the glamorous world of PAPs (Park Avenue Princesses)and her loveable heroine, Moi, a 'champagne bubble of a girl' who became an instant hit with readers from coast to coast. 'Missing the gals from Sex and the City Bergdorf Blondes is the next best thing.'-USA Today

Bergdorf Blondes

SYKES,PLUM

Literary

"We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand."---Randy Pausch A lot of professors give talks titled "The Last Lecture." Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them. And while they speak, audiences can't help but mull the same question: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy? When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave--"Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams"--wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because "time is all you have...and you may find one day that you have less than you think"). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living. In this book, Randy Pausch has combined the humor, inspiration and intelligence that made his lecture such a phenomenon and given it an indelible form. It is a book that will be shared for generations to come.

The Last Lecture

RANDY PAUSCH

Professionals & Academics

Madam Secretary: A Memoir

Born in 1937, Madeleine Albright came from an Eastern Europe torn by war and the Holocaust to reach the highest echelons of American government as Secretary of State under President Clinton. Her memoir will cover her childhood and emigration, her role as wife and mother of three daughters, the painful breakdown of her marriage, and her life in politics. She will bring to life the world leaders and politicians she worked with intimately in her years in public service. She will talk very candidly about the real difficulties of being the only woman at the table and the battles she had to fight to prove her worth. And at a time when the US is examining the legacy of its policy in the Middle East during the Clinton Administration, Secretary Albright's testimony will provide essential listening-throwing light on the key players, explaining and exploring foreign policy for the non-specialist.

Madam Secretary

Albright, Madeleine Korbel

Community & Culture

Adam Murphy, a twenty-five-year-old journalist, is chasing a career-making story of a serial killer preying on young gay men in West Hollywood when he is abruptly fired by the magazine that employs him. He soon learns his former lover has disappeared, but what hes about to uncover is far more diabolical than he could ever have imagined. Light Before Day is a riveting and complex mystery set against the gothic landscape that Rice has made his own.

Light Before Day

Rice, Christopher

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