Comes a moment as Leslie Jones talks about her memoir, Leslie F*ckng Jones (Grand Central Publishing, Sept. 19), when the one-time Saturday Night Live comedian, former host of a television game show, and co-host of The Fckery podcast shows just how deft she is at physical comedy. (Lucille Ball was an inspiration, after all.) She’s been riffing on therapy and begins acting out a therapist rifling through a file cabinet of neuroses, fears, and defenses. It’s funny, to be sure. It’s also indicative of an irrepressible, wholly distinctive energy, a force she wields throughout a memoir that covers childhood sexual abuse, her family’s time in Memphis and Los Angeles, her basketball hoop dreams that were (easily) supplanted by more deeply rooted dreams of becoming a comedian, her arrival at and departure from SNL. We’ve edited the conversation for length and clarity.

What led to this memoir now?

When I left SNL after Ghostbusters and all that stuff, people were always saying You should write a book because you’re a really good storyteller. And the first time I heard that I was like, Really? I always thought that I was a gab, gab, gab gabber. I love people to see the story, down to where the fork was sitting. I love that. So, I was like, should I do a book? Am I old enough to do a book? Have I lived enough?

Jamie Foxx gave you advice early in your career: Young’un, you’re going to have to go live.

That fake-it-till-you’re-making-it shit is a thing that kills the youngsters, because they’re trying to figure out, what is this formula? What they need to understand is it’s not a formula. It’s work. You have to work. There’s no microwave. There’s no recipe. At three years, when I was doing comedy, I was like, Shit, I’m famous now. And I asked [comic] J. Anthony Brown how long does it really take for you to become a good comic? And he said, 10 years. I burst into fucking tears. And he just laughed and walked off.

Once you got a mic in your hand you had this clarity about wanting to be a comic. Do you have fresh clarity about other things that you are?

Yes. I’m decisive. I always say I don’t know what I want, but I do know what I want. I’m just not brave enough sometimes. It’s not even that I’m not brave enough. It’s that I don’t think people can take it, or I don’t think people are prepared to hear what I want. Or people are going to say, you can’t have that. And trust me, girl, it took me a long time to really accept that.

At one point you sum up the intentions of the book as to “glamorize growth.”

I mean, the turning of the leaves is a real thing. Moving past the fear is courage, right? An example I give is, if you put a wall in front of stagnant water, it molds because it’s not moving. You have to move that wall, so the water can flow. You put up that big wall of I’m not going to fucking change, trust me, you will rot. You will die. I hate to say it that way, but you will rot and die. When you go through your problems, when you go through your pain, on the other side of it is a different version of you. There’s no such thing as an overnight success, man. I am a bottle of wine corked in 1967, and now you guys are enjoying the fruits of the cellar.

Having been sexually abused at a very young age, you are very thoughtful about not being a victim.

That was a very important thing for me, the victim thing. I know people who have been through it, and they wear it as a uniform—hey, listen, however you need to get through it, however you need to deal with it, God bless you—but I am the type of person that you’re not going to get to hold me hostage forever. Just because you was able to do something bad to me doesn’t mean that you get to keep me and my brain hostage for the rest of my life, right?

In the book you talk about going back to talk to your younger self. There’s a generosity in that gesture that you also extend to your parents and your brother.

It’s empathy, too. When I was writing this book and telling these stories, I kept thinking, damn my dad was, like, in his late 30s raising two kids after doing Vietnam. Like, what the fuck? And we were crazy. When I hear people disrespecting their parents and stuff, I just be like, damn, you just don’t really understand that these people are like normal human beings that decided to have a child. They are not superheroes. They’re not invincible, and we need to give them more respect.

You’re so good at shoutouts: Fancy Nails salon and Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles, Keenan Thompson and SNL guest hosts. You also give a shoutout to therapy in these beautiful, subtle ways.

One of the best things that I’ve ever done is go to therapy. Everybody needs it. Everybody needs it. It’s amazing how we can take our car in for oil change, and we can do all this other maintenance stuff on our house, but not ourselves. We try to do our own oil change. I’m just going to get it right. I’m going to start reading the Bible. I’m going to start working out. I’m going to start saying affirmations. And that’s going to fix everything. No, the fuck it’s not. When I started therapy, the very first thing I realized was how much I lied to myself. Oh my God, the lies we tell ourselves daily are amazing. The lies that we tell ourselves to keep ourselves down, the lies that we tell ourselves to keep ourselves up. We lie to ourselves, and we never tell the story how the fuck the story really is. Therapy is a place where a person comes in who is professionally trained to help you audit your thoughts, help you go into your files: This ain’t supposed to be here. This is supposed to be over here. This is not even a viable piece of paper. This? Garbage, garbage, garbage, garbage. [Jones pantomimes rifling through a file cabinet and tossing stuff out.]

So how do you feel about writing the memoir?

When we finished, it felt like I had just taken a good dump. Now I can move forward. Now I’ve done this. I’ve told this.

Well told, by the way.

Thanks, make sure you listen to the audio. It’s nothing like the book, it’s all the stories. The audio is mad.

Lisa Kennedy writes for the New York Times, Variety, the Denver Post, and other publications.