Ready for just about the greatest end to a week ever? Jane Lynch and her beautiful wife Dr. Lara Embry, are photographed glowingly in love in the latest issue of Vogue. In the accompanying article, Lynch and Embry discuss falling in love, tying the knot, co-parenting their daughter, Haden, and the ups and downs of Lynch’s personal and professional life. It all ties into to Happy Accidents, Lynch’s uproarious and deeply touching autobiography she co-wrote with her wife. Here are some excerpts from the interview Lynch and Embry gave to Vogue.
“We’ve been cracking up over it writing it together,” says Embry, 42, a toothsome brunette in the Andie MacDowell mold. “In terms of self-disclosure, there’s very little that surprises me anymore,” Embry adds. “So that’s how she can handle writing my life story and not go. . . ‘I’m outta here!’ ” says Lynch, laughing.
On a golden California afternoon, as they strike a Thelma and Louise pose together for Vogue, the couple seems almost disarmingly in love. “They’re adorable together,” notes Cheyenne Jackson, who plays the dastardly Dustin Goolsby on Glee, “doting, respectful, and just clearly crazy about each other.”
“We’ve taken on everything in our first year of marriage,” says Lynch. “Moving. I gained a daughter. We renovated a house—and writing a book. I mean, talk about learning about your wife!”
In the interview Embry and Lynch describe their meeting as love at first sight, though Embry says she was hesitant to date after her former partner left her to become a born-again-Christian, shack up with a man, and bar her from visiting their adopted daughter.
“I had stopped dating altogether,” says Embry. “I mean, you have to sit down and think, How do you trust your judgment? But I saw Jane walking in the lobby and I thought, I’m supposed to follow her. It was like I’d been picked up in a fishing net. I was supposed to go that way—and she was actually going the wrong way! But it was like the door was cracked. It was perfect.”
For Lynch the timing was fortuitous, too. “I had reached a kind of contentment,” she says. “I didn’t have that driving kind of fevered ambition, that fear that I gotta take the next thing. And you go years not knowing what the next thing is. Now, when things are presented, they either feel right or they don’t. And I don’t take parts just to do them anymore.”
“It’s such a contrast with my life,” says Embry. “I’m a psychologist, and you do your school and then you have a career that you’ve set yourself up for. I never realized that for an actor there were so many auditions and uncertainty. It’s such a different style of living. It takes a lot of calm.”
More on next page...
\\\
(continued)
Lynch also shares her struggles growing up feeling different than her siblings and friends. And though she found her passion for acting early in life, it would take her decades to fully accept what she realized before she had the language to identify it; that she was a lesbian.
“…A huge tomboy who wanted nothing more than to play baseball from sunup to sundown”; she would sneak into her dad’s closet and play dress-up in his clothes, “like the quintessential sixties man I longed to be.” “I adore Mad Men,” she tells me. “I want to come back as Jon Hamm in my next life!”
As a child Lynch “never felt quite right,” and her outsider status was confirmed when, at the age of
twelve, friends told her about boys they had spied walking hand in hand on a beach in Florida. She realized then that “that’s what I have . . . I am the girl version of that,” a revelation that was swiftly followed by the firm knowledge that no one could ever know. “When I grew up,” says Lynch, “just like in Glee, you had to be what they considered ‘normal’ or you got a Slushee in your face. I didn’t want to be too tall. I didn’t want to be too loud. I didn’t want to be gay.”
For more on Lynch’s autobiography, her life with Embry, and the Emmy-winning Glee role that was created just for her, read the complete story on Vogue.com now.
