by Megyn Kelly
This is the story of how I found myself on that debate stage, and how asking that question led to one of the toughest years of my life.
1
No False Praise
To know who I am, you have to know where I’m from.
My family raised me in upstate New York with the core message: Be whoever you are. That person may (or may not) be extraordinary. We’re not going to lie to make you feel better, but we’ll love you no matter what. In our house, it wasn’t “You are special.” It was more like “You don’t seem that special so far, but we don’t care.”
That foundation of you-are-nothing-remarkable-and-that’s-okay worked very well for me. When I was growing up, I felt zero pressure to achieve. I mean zero. As a result, I was able to figure out for myself what I wanted to do and find my own motivation. I grew up happy and, thanks to my parents’ honesty, had no delusions of grandeur. Early on, I knew what I was and wasn’t good at, because no one ever oversold my talents.
My parents would never have even considered the trophies-for-everyone parenting philosophy now so in vogue. In our family, trophies were for winners, and there was no pressure to win. If you did win, you were praised. If you didn’t, everyone would have a laugh and a big meal and call it a day. My family simply did not believe in false praise. As a result, I grew up the opposite of spoiled. Everything about my outlook—my values, my sense of right and wrong, my independence—began there.
The same went for my sister, Suzanne, and brother, Pete, who are six and five years older than me respectively. We spent our childhood in the suburbs of Syracuse and Albany, attending public school and going to Catholic mass most Sundays. In the summers we went swimming at the town park or ran under the sprinkler in our backyard. We played kick the can on our street and rode our bikes everywhere. In the winter, we went sledding on a trail nicknamed “Greased Lightning,” thanks to my obsession with the movie Grease. We ice-skated on a nearby pond. My brother mowed the lawn and took out the garbage for his allowance; my sister and I unloaded the dishwasher and cleaned up after dinner. It doesn’t get much more Norman Rockwell than us.
My attitude started with my parents. I lived simply and honestly because they did. I adored my father, Edward Kelly, a college professor and meat-and-potatoes Irishman with a huge, bellowing laugh. He had beautiful blue eyes and salt-and-pepper hair that he kept on the longer side. He is still the man against whom I measure other men.
My mother used to say I was the female Ed, minus the beard and mustache; from the eyebrows down—eyes, nose, cheekbones—I look exactly like him. Tall and slim, he always wore his college ring, a houndstooth newsboy cap, and glasses with thin gold rims. He had a space between his two front teeth, which I had too when I was young.
My father never had a harsh word for me, and he made me feel loved and valued. He would come home from work in the evenings and scoop me up in his arms, saying, “Hiya, tiger!” before taking off his heavy navy trench coat.
We would sit around our upstate New York dinner table each night, and Dad would ask each of us, “What’s the report?”
We’d have to tell him what we’d learned or done that day. When it was my turn, I would prattle on.
“Make her shut up!” my brother and sister would plead.
“You had your chance,” Dad would say. “And now you will listen to her.”
Worldly and erudite, Dad traveled as an education consultant to exotic locations such as Bali, Tehran, and Africa, and he used sophisticated words all the time.
“Dad!” I’d complain when I lost track of what he was saying. “Speak English.”
“Megyn, I will not lower my vocabulary to meet yours,” he said. “You must raise yours to meet mine.”
Still, he was fascinated by us—these little, increasingly intellectual beings. He wanted to exchange ideas, to talk about language and the power of words, sentence structure, what was proper and improper. He made me feel interesting, and I worked hard to keep up with him.
He once wrote a hundred-page grant proposal and gave it to me to proofread. I was nine.
I sat down with a dictionary and I read the entire proposal.
“This is really good, Dad,” I said.
He dedicated the work to me: “This is for my daughter Megyn, who read this and said, ‘This is good, Dad.’” (He got the grant.) I felt respected.
He always had his nose in a book, and these were not beach reads. When he read Shogun, I remember marveling at how long it was, and after he finished that, he picked up an even longer book. He could quote War and Peace and Moby Dick. He loved to write: education papers, a book about teaching that he never got to publish, and poems, some of which I have framed and hanging on my wall to this day.
Dad worked a lot, but still found ways to be present—he read and sang to us, took me to clarinet lessons, sat down on the floor to play jacks after work. He was such a natural father that it’s hard to believe he almost forewent having a family. As a young man, he’d considered becoming a Christian Brother and taking vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. While he chose (good news for me) family life instead, he still lived a life of faith and scholarship, talking to us often about what kind of a man Jesus was. He said we needed to picture the son of God as a man, doing all the things men do, to truly understand him. He taught me to value education and faith, and he made me believe that what I had to say mattered, regardless of whether my siblings agreed.
That’s not to say he didn’t worry about us. Dad observed his children’s habits almost anthropologically. Circa 1983, I went through a phase of painting my nails in elaborate patterns: with stripes and dots and zigzags, all different colors. And then I’d put decals on them.
“Linda,” Dad said, watching this ritual. “I am concerned about Megyn’s values.”
“Ed, get over it,” my mom said. “She’s twelve.”
This was their dynamic in a nutshell. If my father taught me to take myself seriously, my mother, Linda, taught me not to take myself too seriously. For her, laughter is the secret of life.
A second-generation Italian American, Mom was—and still is—a force of nature. From my earliest memories, she was always beautiful, with a larger-than-life personality. For me, her best attribute—and there are many to choose from—is her self-deprecating sense of humor. She is the kind of person who lights up a room. When she’s there, everyone feels a bit brighter. When she walks out, the room is unhappier.
She has brown hair, or blond, or red, or some other color, depending on the season and her mood. (She died it pink once, “for breast cancer awareness.”) She has never struggled to attract attention. For as long as I can remember, everyone has wanted to be around my mother.
Mom’s sense of humor is among the greatest influences in my life. She is one of the funniest people I have ever known, though not always intentionally. One time, there was an ax murder in Delmar, our Albany suburb. I grant you, it doesn’t start off funny—bear with me.
The suspect in the case had been identified but not yet arrested and was still free and working—at our local vet, as it turned out. My mother brought her enormous mastiff mix in one day for care, and the suspect helped pick up the dog. He looked a bit wary of the animal.
My mother reassured him: “Oh, you have nothing to worry about! An ax murderer could come through our house in the middle of the night, and she wouldn’t do a thing!” Thankfully he chose not to test this theory.
Mom has a condition we’ve dubbed chronic lyric-osis. She’s always singing—poorly, and with the wrong words. She loved Prince’s “Raspberry Beret”—or, as she prefers to sing it, “Strawberry Beret.” And then there’s Creedence Clearwater’s hit “There’s a bathroom on the right.” Some prefer to sing it with its actual lyrics: “There’s a bad moon on the rise.” In fact, she often mishears or mispronounces things. She refuses to properly say the names Rachel or Paige, preferring Racial and Peige, to rhyme with beige. One summer our family was served Stoli O vodka and sodas at the Sara
toga racetrack. My mother was determined to re-create this later but had a tough time finding the ingredients. No liquor store in the Albany region, strangely enough, carried the brand “Smolio.”
Nine times out of ten, the family stories we devour revolve around something hilarious my mother has done or some fantastic embarrassment she has brought upon herself unwittingly. Like the time she bought a FUBU sweatshirt at a garage sale and wore it around town without knowing what it stood for. (Google it.)
Or the time she told everyone her cough sounded just like the theme from Ghostbusters. Or when she got a tattoo at age seventy (a rosary, on her foot). Or when she told us she was the voice twin of Tina Turner and sang “What’s Love Got to Do with It” nonstop for weeks. Or told us she had the perfect country twang and sang “Peace in the Valley” with the worst country twang ever. (She says that when she dies, she’s going to leave a recording of her terrible singing, and if we don’t play it at her funeral she’ll haunt us from the grave.) Or when she decided at age seventy-three that she wanted to be a security guard and signed up to take classes, but then backed out when she realized they weren’t going to give her a gun and she’d have to work weekends. She later told us: “All I really wanted was a job where I could put my thumbs in my belt loops.”
I could go on.
To this day, my mom keeps me laughing . . . and humble. She is proud of me, but the moments in my career that might lead to a Linda phone call are less about any kind of high achievement on my part and more typically along the lines of that time I tried to say “Huckabee” and instead said “Fuckabee” on the air. She speed-dialed me on that one!
My mom has always wanted to keep my head from growing too big (“You don’t look good in gray.” “How long are you going to keep your hair like that?”), but she loves the fact that as I have become better known, so has she. She said her physical therapist told her, “Whenever I see Megyn on TV, I think, Wow, her mom is my patient!” And my mom responded, “And you must always think exactly that—whenever you see Megyn, you think of her amazing mother!”
One time we went out to dinner in Albany. “Stand up so people can see who you are!” she told me. I laughed, firmly attached to my seat. But Mom gets her way with just about everyone else. For example, when one of her doctors seemed cold to her, she told him, “Look, I know you have no bedside manner, but if you are going to operate on me, you have to start talking to me.”
That’s how she is—she lays it on the line, but charmingly. On command, her doctor struck up a conversation, and it turned out he was a Fox fan. Now he talks nonstop, and she loves regaling him with behind-the-scenes stories about Bill O’Reilly.
In February 2016 I was on the cover of Vanity Fair. A full month went by before she mentioned it to me. Maybe she didn’t see it, I thought—after all, she doesn’t really peruse those kinds of publications. She’d much prefer a Reader’s Digest, Parade, or People—all of which I love too. More likely than not, I assumed she just didn’t see it as a reason for a chat.
Weeks later she casually mentioned, “All of my doctors saw the Vanity Fair cover. They loved it.”
“How did they see it?” I asked.
“I showed them all.”
This is vintage Linda. She’s tough at times, but she’s always in my corner—the way she has been my whole life. And while she is happy for my success, she’s perhaps a bit surprised by it, too. I think it’s fair to say my mother never anticipated great achievement on my part, nor did my slightly-above-average grades give her reason to expect great things. She made me take typing—twice—so I’d “always have something to fall back on.” (I am a fast typist.) She was never hoping to raise a doctor. I think she thought my best hope was to marry one.
“They don’t give cheerleading scholarships, Megyn!” my mother said if I blew off homework. The truth is, they do, but certainly not at my level. All I had going for me was school spirit and the ability to rhyme. To this day, I can’t even do a cartwheel.
In truth, though, I think she just never much cared about academic details. Like my father, she wanted me to love learning, and I did, but neither of them rode me about grades or extracurricular activities. Nor did they really have to. She could not tell you how I did on the SAT (not that well) or where I graduated in my law school class (with honors)—not because she didn’t want good things for me, but because she could always see I had decent grades and seemed to be happy enough.
Still, she had fun letting us know where things stood. When Mom went back to school to earn her master’s degree, she posted her grades on the refrigerator next to ours.
“Mine are better than yours,” she’d say.
It wasn’t mean; it was true.
In my family, we are proud of and kind to each other, but we often show our love not by being falsely polite, but by letting our guard down and saying what we really think. We’re on the radical honesty program, which has led to greater intimacy.
This no-bullshit approach goes all the way to the top. My now-hundred-year-old Nana (my mother’s mother, naturally) once stroked my long blond hair and said lovingly, in her New York/New Jersey accent, “Ya hay-er is so lowng . . .” Then her tone changed to displeasure: “Too lowng!” Once I came downstairs after getting dressed for a friend’s wedding. “Is thatcha dress o’ ya petticoat?” Nan asked me. Apparently it was a bit short.
Whenever you talk to Nana on one of her birthdays—her real name, by the way, is Antoinette Frances Holzworth DeMaio, though she’s better known as Tebby—she’ll tell you how old she is, quickly followed by “Ain’t that revoltin’? Da woy-ums should have me by now. I should be playnt-ed. Why ain’t I playnt-ed yet?”
“Because the Lord doesn’t like complainers,” my mom will say.
So my mother comes by her bluntness honestly.
Speaking of which, when I played Jack’s wife in our elementary school production of Jack and the Beanstalk, my mother’s first reaction was to criticize my onstage sweeping. Of course, since Linda is not much of a cleaner, this one didn’t have much of an impact.
“Mom, am I really smart?” I asked her once.
“You’re about average,” she said.
Now that we’re older, the rules have changed a bit. I’ll get a haircut, and I can feel the windup: “Honey, I have to tell you something,” she’ll say.
“Mom,” I’ll reply, “you can criticize me, but just know, that for every one you lob my way, I get to give you one back.”
It’s amazing how much less criticism she levels at me now.
My parents met in New York City in the early 1960s. My dad was studying at Manhattan College, and my mother was in nursing school. He would visit her in her school’s “beau parlor,” where they would share scotch he’d smuggled in via shampoo bottle. From there, they would go out to the White Horse Tavern in the West Village, where inspired patrons like my dad would get up on the tables and recite Shakespeare. He was clever. She was a riot. They adored each other.
My father had a great combination of intellectualism and romanticism, and I think that’s why he and my mom got along so well together. My mom was not the philosopher type, but she was savvy, whip-smart, and she loved his erudition. They had a yin-and-yang thing going in that regard.
Both devout Catholics, they married not long into their courtship. She was twenty-two. He was twenty-three. One year later, they had my sister. A year after that, they had my brother. They’d tried to follow Catholic guidelines against birth control. “Then I had two babies in two years,” my mom said, “and forget that!”
I was born in November 1970, when they were living briefly in Champaign, Illinois, which lets me brag that I was born in champagne. Far from it, in fact. The apartment we lived in was so small, my nursery was my parents’ closet.
When I was seven months old, we moved to the Syracuse suburb of DeWitt, and our house was decked out in the latest style. The split-level ranch I spent the first nine years of my life in was classic 1970s: thick orange shag carpe
t, orange drapes, a black, orange, white, and red couch, all lit up with orange lamps. My favorite of these was a lamp whose shade was a spinning forest-fire scene. This being the seventies, naturally there were beanbag chairs, but only in the basement—we kept it classy, of course.
My parents had parties all the time at our house. There was always a guy named Malcolm playing the guitar, barefoot, and a few others just like him. They weren’t hippies—they were academics, and creative types. My father spoke passionately about religion, philosophy, life’s purpose. He loved music. At these parties, people would come with instruments or sing or read a poem. You could perform a verse if you wanted to act a little. One way or another, you had to be willing to put yourself out there.
During the parties, I got to serve the drinks. I loved using the tongs to put in the ice. They would play Don McLean’s “American Pie” and I would dance and dance. At the end of the night, I would escape to my room, where I had a small white-and-green record player on which I played Alfred Hitchcock stories read by Hitchcock himself. (In retrospect: How creepy! Why didn’t my parents just buy me the 45 of Leif Garrett’s “Runaround Sue”?)
My mother managed a lot back then, and even today I’m not quite sure how. She was working as a nurse and studying for her PhD and raising three kids and yet still throwing these parties, doing all the cooking, serving, and clean-up on her own. Maybe that’s why she’s still nine credits short on that doctorate, and why my parents didn’t have much time for recreation—they rarely took a couples vacation, and never exercised a day in their lives. My mom worked very hard, and she was my role model.
Like all couples, my parents fought sometimes, but they never lost their sense of humor. One time my mother and father were sitting in the living room, and she was giving him a hard time for something. He said very little, which was typical when they argued. After a while, he stood up, walked over to her, and silently dumped his Manhattan over her head. Then he massaged it into her hair. I still remember how the maraschino cherry looked as it rolled down her face. She had to laugh. They made up.