■ Saturday Night Live pissed me off. I’d been writing my own material for three years. I’d had a one-woman show. In San Francisco, I’d done improv with a really funny group called Spaghetti Jam, and I’d improvised with Robin Williams one night for 45 minutes. So I knew my stuff. I auditioned with so many characters and so much material and thought, People are going to be writing for me like crazy. But the writers literally would say, “It’s impossible to write for women.” I thought, I can’t wait to get out of here.

■ We grew up in Garfield Park and lived in a terrible building in a one-bedroom with six kids. There were terrible people, and we saw terrible things. We had to take a bath downstairs. I never got the true story, but I later told my mom, “I was in the bathtub, and I remember a man came in and put me on top of the toilet.” I was 4 years old. I talk about it in therapy. That same man tried to break into our apartment when my parents were at work. Later, my brothers and I would tell stories about these things, and we’d laugh. People go, “Why are you laughing at it?” I’d say, “Because it was so terrible.”

■ When I was little, I thought I was a boy, because my sisters didn’t care about sports, and I just loved them. I started watching baseball with my dad. Always the Cubs. And he loved hockey, because he was born in Canada. I could sit with him forever. My sisters would be like, “There’s something wrong with you, Nora.”

■ My parents were very much into the civil rights movement. They were going to marches and promoting integration. They had an interesting group of people that got together at the Austin house we moved into. My first three years in high school, my friends were Black. But after Martin Luther King Jr. got assassinated, they didn’t want nothing to do with me. It was really hard. So my mom sent me to a boarding school down in Nauvoo, Illinois, with like 90 nuns.

■ When I was 20, a man of stature raped me. I thought, If you hadn’t gone with this guy and trusted him, this would never have happened. I couldn’t stop crying, because it felt like I’d lost so much in that moment. My innocence was gone. He goes, “Hey, kid” — he called me ‘kid’ — “you got to quit crying. We’ve got to go through the lobby.” I was sitting next to him on the way home, and he dropped an envelope in my lap that had stacks of money, and I stopped crying. Because I was poor, I was a waitress, and this was thousands of dollars. He just said, “Silence.” I never told on him. I had to break up with my boyfriend, because I couldn’t tell him it happened. And I ended up quitting art school. After I’d been on Saturday Night Live, I got a letter from the man backstage at a show I was doing in Chicago. He was very remorseful and said, “I never should have done that.” But it affects your whole life. It took me 25 or 30 years to tell my friends.

■ We weren’t an angry family, but anger was accepted. It would come out like a flash, then it was done. One time when the towel rack wasn’t working right, my brother just ripped it off the wall. But a lot of people can’t handle that. It scares them. It took me a long time, but I’m a much, much more conciliatory person now. I’m able to say what I mean, and if it doesn’t go my way, then it doesn’t. You’ve got to move on.