Jane Lynch has talked about her battle with the bottle, but the “Glee” star reveals that after kicking the booze, she turned to an over-the-counter cold medication to get stoned.
In her upcoming memoir, “Happy Accidents,” Lynch tells that she was so unhappy that she “wanted oblivion” and found it by downing NyQuil nightly. She continued her cough-syrup habit even after getting over a years-long alcoholic love affair with Miller Lite.
“I found myself eating about a gallon of chocolate ice cream daily to replace the copious amounts of sugar my body was used to from my daily beer intake,” she writes about her initial effort to kick booze in 1991 at age 31.
“I did, however, continue my habit of taking NyQuil before bed,” she admits. “Though no longer drinking Miller Lite, I was still in need of something to soothe me.
“The fact that NyQuil had alcohol in it was not something I acknowledged at all. I still considered myself on the wagon.”
The star’s cold-medication consumption worsened when she moved from Chicago to New York while playing Carol Brady on stage in “The Real Live Brady Bunch,” which also starred Conan O’Brien sidekick Andy Richter.
“[The show] ran for 10 months at the Village Gate, and I was miserable the whole time,” the actress recalls in the book, out Sept. 13 from Hyperion Voice. “I’d close the drapes of my tiny room, take a swig of NyQuil, toast with a simple ‘Bye-bye,’ and go into a deep sleep.”
Lynch, who plays Sue Sylvester on “Glee,” wound up in AA after a night of getting high with her “Brady Bunch” castmates. “I smoked myself into oblivion that night,” she writes. “I still felt like crap and even lonelier than I had felt before.”
Lynch says she has found happiness with wife Lara Embry. After meeting her, she said, “I was immediately smitten … I was all the way in, and yes, I had only known her a minute.”