Katey Sagal, best known as Peg Bundy & Gemma Morrow, has had a long and varied career over the last 30 years. Grace Notes chronicles Sagal’s life from birth to the present in poetic vignettes and honest essays.
Katey had a pretty loosely raised childhood, her mother was often sick and her father, a TV director, was hard to bond with until Katey was in her early twenties. Her teenage years and twenties were plagued with drug & alcohol addictions and both her parents died young. She also had thyroid cancer when she was 28!
She talks openly about her personal life; two divorces before her current marriage to Kurt Sutter and her four children, her first child was stillborn and her fourth born via surrogate.
Sagal’s original career ambition was to be a singer, she sang back up for Bette Midler and had several near-misses with recording contracts before finding success on Married With Children. After a decade on the ground breaking Married With Children Katey struggled to find a second successful television show before landing on Eight Simple Rules with John Ritter. After his death the show went on for a little longer but eventually ended. Katey always wanted to get in to dramatic roles and eventually her husband, Sutter, wrote the role of Gemma Morrow on Sons of Anarchy for her. I haven’t actually seen SOA but I’ve heard she’s pretty bad ass in it and she is very proud of her work on the show. She is grateful for her career and confesses she’s been lucky to never be without work for too long. Throughout her acting career she has always found time to sing, her first love.
She’s a pretty good writer, although the choppy style in some of the chapters is bit much for me, but mostly she is incredibly honest about the ups and downs in her life which is what I always look for in a memoir.
Watch Sons of Anarchy. It starts out legitimately good, then spirals out of control until it explodes all over itself. As a Shonda fan, you’d enjoy it.