Actor Kate McKinnon’s Diabolical Plan To Take over Kids’ Imaginations

The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science by Kate McKinnon ($17.99; Little, Brown Books For Young Readers) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

Actor Kate McKinnon is one of the most successful members of Saturday Night Live in history and beloved by fans (and Al Roker!). Ten years younger than the 50 year old sketch comedy series itself, McKinnon is already a 10-time Emmy nominee. And when she received the first of two Emmys, she was the first cast member to win an acting Emmy in nearly 30 years (Dana Carvey was the last to do so before her). Then she played Weird Barbie in the $1 billion smash hit film, cementing her status as an icon for iconoclasts.

And now she’s coming for your kids. Well, their brains. Ok, she’s not taking their brains, she just wants to take up residence in them. Her plan involves McKinnon’s first book. Called The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette For Young Ladies Of Mad Science, it’s a daffy, dangerous mix of silliness and science that speaks to the kids who are just a tad off kilter in the best possible way. 

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Think Lemony Snicket but with much bigger worms that might just eat you, adults who do not always have your best interests at heart (even if they think they do) and a kind of intimidating Millicent Quibb, who seems awfully unhinged in a Wonka-like way that’s hard to resist. 

“I've always been writing,” says McKinnon about her venture into novels. “Comedy is half writing, half performing. Even if you're not a comedy writer, you're always writing. Early in my career I was coming up with characters. Even in high school, I was writing little character pieces and I just never stopped. I had the opportunity to do that throughout at SNL, in conjunction with some of the finest minds in the world, and I learned a lot from them. I think that this is just a natural outgrowth of that. I think the middle grade genre lends itself so well–like sketch comedy–to characters that have silly names and big hair, which are my favorite kind of characters.”

The story centers on three orphan girls named Gertrude, Eugenia and Dee-Dee Porch who never quite fit in at their school and are quite fine with that. Expelled (again!), they have one last chance of happiness at the Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science…assuming they’re not eaten first by giant, rock-crushing worms or captured by a secret society planning to send the entire town into turmoil while unleashing its demonic leader. Heavens! 

McKinnon’s heart and soul is poured into the story, which draws heavily on her own childhood passion for science, when not tramping through the woods or reading a book. She delighted in coming up with the town name of Antiquarium and the secret society and the Porch sisters and a character like Millicent Quibb, who the novel describes on her entrance by saying, “She looked a fright, and a mess, though more of a mess than a fright.”

How ever did she land on Millicent Quibb as the perfect name? 

“I'm obsessed with Victoriana and gothic literature,” says McKinnon. “And I wanted to come up with a real 1890s sounding name that also had a bit of quirk and charm and sprightliness and also sounded a little bit dangerous, but a little bit goofy. I feel like Millicent Quibb sounds like a mad scientist who will take you on an adventure that might kill you but will also be a tender mentor figure. At the same time.”

McKinnon didn’t write this book specifically to become a movie or tv show. But in the audio version (recorded with her sister, comic Emily Lynne), you can hear her gusto in bringing Quibb and the others to life. 

“I can't help but act stuff out as I'm writing it,’ says McKinnon. “So I just thought, if I was a mad science professor, what would I be like? I was very inspired by Amelia Earhart and Katherine Hepburn and those trailblazing, pants-wearing women of the 20th century. 

“Especially by Juliette Gordon Low, the founder of the Girl Scouts. She is a hoot. If you Google her, the look of Millicent Quibb–the clothes, the hair, the vibe–was very informed by pictures of this lady.

"Her own husband had been a cad and she wanted girls to know how to fight and interact with nature," says McKinnon. "This was in the early, early 1900s and she wears these fabulous, like…poorly tailored charcoal bags and has a very severe look with wild hair. I thought, well that’s a mentor these girls need.” 

The book is filled with the Porch sisters and their love of experiments and animals and the natural world (and books!). Ask a few questions and you soon discover these all spring from McKinnon’s own passions. Her favorite and most influential books easily include as much nonfiction as fiction.

Author Kate McKinnon’s Favorite Books

Healers of the Wild by Shannon K. Jacobs (out of print; check used bookstores or your library for similar titles!) 

“I loved the Girl Scouts because I love nature and I love to be out and I love science,” says McKinnon. “It was about interacting with nature and learning about how the real world works. I mean, the real world, like the tactile earth. And I thought it was so exciting.

"My favorite book when I was young was this…I don't remember the name of it, but it was about how to care for wounded animals that you find in the woods or on the side of the road. It was like, ‘If a squirrel has broken its leg, here's what to do; you put it in a little box with an incubator.’ I was obsessed with this and I never found a wounded bird to rehabilitate. All very healthy, apparently. I was obsessed with animals and nature and having adventures outside. Which, you know, that was very possible in the ‘90s, when there were no phones to distract anybody and so that's what we did.”

NOTE: McKinnon never remembered the name of this particular childhood book, but Healers of the Wild captures the general vibe. Hey, I’m improvising!

Inside Story: The Power of the Transformational Arc by Dara Marks ($24.95; Three Mountain Press) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble

“The most important thing was I just wanted it to be a funny romp,” says McKinnon about her debut book. “But everything must have theme baked into it. I'm a big, big proponent of this screenwriting book called Inside Story by Dara Marks that is about the importance of theme and how everything–character and plot–comes from theme. And you know, a story is at the heart of it a theory about what you think life is all about or how you think the world is, and where was I going with this? I've become grandiose!” She laughs.

“There's definitely stuff I wanted to say, but I didn't want to ever shove it down anyone's throat,” says McKinnon, who is casually funny but takes questions seriously and often pauses to gather her thoughts. “So I hope that the theme is baked into the story itself. I love Pixar and DreamWorks and Disney films for young people because the thematic content is often quite…not adult, but it's beautifully rich. Rich and has these big ideas about life baked in and so there's plenty there for adults as well. I wanted to have just some little nods to bigger, more serious ideas. But you could miss it if you blink.”

The Witches by Roald Dahl; illustrated by Quentin Blake ($8.99; Viking Books For Young Readers) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org 

The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill; illustrated by Ronni Solbert ($12.99; New York Review Children’s Collection) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

“I fell in love with Pippi Longstocking,” says McKinnon, when asked about her favorite books as a kid. “So I read that a lot. And then I was obsessed with Roald Dahl’s The Witches because the Grand High Witch is like the greatest villain ever written. Also, it begins–I don't know if you remember–but it begins with a set of instructions about how to identify a real witch. I knew it was fiction, but it was so, so exciting to have it framed as, ‘I'm talking to you guys, you need to know this.’

“I was so manipulated by that and by a 1960s middle grade book called The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill, which was fiction, but it was framed [as] based on truth.”

I interrupt and wrongly tell McKinnon The Pushcart War was based on real events. Nope! Totally made up, but Merrill fooled me. McKinnon loves this toying with reality.

“The whole thing was like an historical account," says McKinnon, "and I was so thrilled by the notion that magic could be real or that the world contained more than I could see with my eyes.”

Needless to say, The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science is presented as a history of real events; it's actually written by Dr. G. Edwina Candlestank, as told to Kate McKinnon. Plus, it’s filled with diagrams and instructions and playful footnotes. But it does not come with giant, stone-crushing worms. Those are sold separately. 

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Electronics for Kids by Oyvind Nydal Dahl ($24.95; No Starch Press) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

Note: again, this is the sort of book McKinnon talks about below. I’m improvising! Plus, it’s by a guy named Dahl and that seemed like too much fun not to include because how often do you get to do a list of books and include two different people named Dahl? Not very often. 

“I read pretty much equal parts fiction and nonfiction,” says McKinnon. “I loved science. I was obsessed with taking apart electronics. So I got this book about electricity out from the library once a week and read that and my animal rescue book. I [love] any crossover between magic and science and the magic of science and the magic of the natural world.

"I wanted this book to be framed as a history. I wanted young readers to feel like, ‘Yeah, I know it's a fiction, but like, maybe? Just maybe?’ I wanted it to look like something that you could find at the back of a dusty old bookstore and like it was written in the 1900s. And yes, diagrams! Diagrams! Because nature is magical enough; you don't even need to have a unicorn. There are varieties of shrimp that are the weirdest thing you could ever imagine. So I wanted to create magic out of nature and science.”

Your Iguana’s Life by Liz Palika (out of print; check your library or used bookstore for similar titles!)

What was McKinnon’s favorite book she received as a gift? If you guessed something about having a reptile as a pet, then you’re right! Again, the book pictured is not the book McKinnon had as a child. (And books about iguanas as pets for kids are hard to come by, oddly enough.) 

“There was a book about iguana care when my mom gave me my iguana, Willie, when I was 14,” says McKinnon. “And my God, that was a dog-eared book. I read that cover to cover. I do love instruction manuals. Willie had a fine life. But iguanas are not meant to live in suburban bedrooms and I have become a strong advocate for that. So eventually we sent him, via a reptile rescue organization to Boca Raton, where he retired.”

Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren ($7.99; Puffin Books) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org 

Wise Child by Monica Furlong ($19.95; Echo Points Book and Media) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

“I always keep like twelve of my favorites on my Kindle just to read,” says McKinnon. “I'll read a paragraph at a time, just to remind me of the tone and the possibilities of the genre in terms of language. You can have so much fun with language. And these incredible authors have taken such liberties with not just the ideas, but the sound of the words themselves. So I like to constantly re-read and remind myself that you can really do whatever you want in this genre."

So the lucky twelve would include The Witches, of course, What else? 

“There's a book called Wise Child by Monica Furlong that's one of my favorites,” says McKinnon, who then reels off a list of top authors. “A lot of Roald Dahl. Pseudonymous Bosch. Lemony Snicket. Trenton Lee Stewart. Ransom Riggs. And Pippi Longstocking, of course. I read them now to understand more about the genre. But also, they're my favorite thing to read.”

The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science by Kate McKinnon ($17.99; Little, Brown Books For Young Readers) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

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