SNL cast member and former OPRF student Cecily Strong’s memoir, “This Will All Be Over Soon,” is a moving time capsule commemorating both the loss of her cousin and the collective loss the world experienced in 2020. Strong wrote the book, published in August, as a series of journal entries beginning on March 24, 2020 and ending nearly a year later.

Anybody who has watched SNL in the past decade knows Strong is extremely funny. Coming from the person who created characters like “The Girl You Wish You Hadn’t Started A Conversation With At A Party,” the memoir is surprisingly serious. Strong’s humor only comes through in her clever and conversational writing style. That conversational style can sometimes devolve into a rambling string of loosely related anecdotes, some happening during 2020 and others from her past.

Throughout the anecdotes, however, Strong experiences and poignantly reflects on the events of 2020. She also memorably grieves the loss of her young-adult cousin, Owen, who died of brain cancer in January, a couple months before quarantine began. By providing stories of his life and death, the memoir serves as a vessel to bring Owen’s story to the world.

“I told Owen often that he was my hero,” writes Strong. “And he was. And even though I hate evenbringing up his cancer, I do so because during the last year and a half, Owen somehow took on the role of OUR fearless leader. Showing all of us how to fight. How to smile. How to stay full of love. How to ‘take no guff,’ like he told Stacia (his girlfriend) before work every morning. How to throw a massive blowout balls-to-the-wall badass 30th birthday party. Let the world do as it may. That’s a real-life hero.”

As I got deeper into the book, I found myself warming to Strong’s scattered writing style. I saw that her style reflected her anxious and lost feeling of grief. Strong never explicitly describes what this experience was like; rather, she conveys it through her style and the common themes of stories she tells. By the end of the book, I found Strong’s storytelling to be engaging; through it, I was able to live in the world her memoir created. Any reader who lived through 2020 will be reminded of their own feelings of loss, anxiety, and confusion the year brought.

The book was particularly meaningful to me because I also experienced the loss of a close family member during the pandemic. About half a year after the death of Strong’s cousin, my brilliant 95-year-old grandma died. Grieving in a time of social distancing was isolating; so much of the time it was just me alone with my thoughts. While I had my family with me, Strong was stuck in her New York apartment with only her dog.

“This Will All Be Over Soon” was particularly interesting to read as an OPRF student, given that Strong was once a Huskie. OPRF is mentioned a few times in the book — and not in a positive light. Strong, who had been an “A” student, was caught with marijuana in her school bag during sophomore year.

The security guards “already knew what was in it when I got to the office,” Strong writes. “But for some reason, they pretended they hadn’t gone through the bag. I’ll never understand this and it always makes me uncomfortable. It was like they were playing a game with me. They opened every pocket except for the one holding the little seedy first bag of weed I’d ever bought. They even said, ‘I guess you can go.’ And as I got up, they said, ‘Oh, wait a minute. We forgot one pocket.’ It felt like a nightmare.”

Strong was expelled, arrested, and taken out of the school in handcuffs. To make matters worse, she later received a letter saying she was a National Merit Commended Scholar based on her PSAT score, but she could not attend the ceremony as she wasn’t allowed within a three-block radius of the school. After attending Catholic school for a semester, she was allowed to come back to OPRF for her junior year. “But I wasn’t okay,” Strong writes. “I didn’t feel good. I started to feel really bad. I stopped going to classes that weren’t the four I really cared about (as well as play rehearsal)…

“…So many nights I thought about doing one of two things: I would get on the freeway and drive west until I got to somewhere warm and welcoming, or I would drive home to sit in the garage with the car running, leaving the heat on so I was warm and comfy, and listen to my favorite mix tapes before I went to sleep and didn’t have to wake up.”

Fortunately, Strong began going to her family psychologist and left OPRF during her junior year. She finished her high school career at the Chicago Academy for the Arts.

For some Cecily Strong superfans, this memoir might be a disappointment; she only touches on small moments in her acting career. However, this gives her space to talk about more relatable and, at least for this memoir, important parts of her life: a long-time abusive relationship with a boyfriend she met at OPRF, a high school friend’s death in college, family gatherings, and issues like gun violence in Chicago.

Unfortunately, OPRF is unable to claim Strong as an alum. She is not on our wall of fame. Her memories of OPRF include the humiliation of being escorted out of the school in handcuffs.

Strong’s ability to turn her pain and loss into such a powerful and moving memoir has given the world a gift as impressive as her career as a comedian and actress. “This Will All Be Over Soon” will start conversations about grief and mental health and should transport future generations to this unique period of loss.