Marlo Thomas has a lot to talk about. After more than four decades in show business, she’s written her first memoir, Growing Up Laughing: My Story and the Story of Funny, in which she looks back lovingly and, yes, with great humor at her extraordinary life as the daughter of comedy legend Danny Thomas and the driving force behind the groundbreaking series That Girl and the bestseller Free to Be. . . You and Me. She broadens the focus on comedy in Growing Up Laughing by personally interviewing more than 20 comic geniuses, from Robin Williams and Jerry Seinfeld to Chris Rock, Conan O’Brien and Tina Fey. Thomas, who has also just launched the website marlothomas.com, talked to MORE about family, feminism and bringing the funny.

MORE: Your book is wonderful. It’s such a pleasure to read a memoir that doesn’t depend on scandalous revelations!
MARLO THOMAS: I’m glad you think so, because I really was not interested in that at all. And I’m not interested in anyone else’s book like that either. I really wanted to see my life through the lens of comedy, because that’s how I remember my life and think about it, even yesterday—it’s about, to me, the fun of it. I’m lucky; that’s the way I was raised, my family was into telling jokes and getting through tension by laughter.
        I tell a story in the book about how my father had an argument with my mother and went to the bottom of the staircase and said, “Rose Marie, I can’t live like this.” And then she fell over laughing, because it was so ridiculous. Sometimes when I am in a very intense moment I say to myself, “Oh, let this go! Just let it go.”  The minute I do, I can laugh at it. I can breathe with it. That’s why I put a laugh of the day on my website. That’s my mission: I want to laugh every day.  If you don’t laugh any place else, you’ll get a laugh on marlothomas.com. 

People must have been after you for years to write an autobiography.
They have been. I really didn’t want to. The idea of sitting down and saying, well, I was born such and such and then I met and then I loved this one and then I was just fabulous doing this and terrible doing this. . .  I’m not really interested in that. But about two years ago we built a new house, and we started having a lot of lunches and dinners to show our friends our new house and so forth. And we all sat around the table telling jokes and stories. And again people would say to me, “I hope you’re writing these down. No one grew up like this, you should write these down.” So after awhile I thought, maybe I will write a few of these down. I had no intention of making a book out of it, but then I got really involved in it.
        Some people said to me, you could talk into a tape recorder, but I don’t know how to talk into a tape recorder. It’s even weirder than giving an interview—it’s an interview with yourself. Friends have read it and said to me, “Well, there is no doubt you wrote this book. It’s your voice. No one else could have written this but you.”  And that makes me feel good because a lot of people have ghostwriters.  I’m glad that it’s obvious it’s my voice.

So you started compiling these stories and took the organizing principle of comedy. . .
Yes. I wasn’t going to interview anyone to begin with and I wasn’t going to put in jokes. That all came because there were some jokes in my life that I was telling, like the red ink joke about the man who goes to Russia and he says to his wife, “They censor your mail in Russia, so when I write you, if I write in red ink it’s a lie and if I write in blue ink it’s the truth.” He writes a letter to her in blue ink saying, "It’s fabulous in Russia, I don’t know what people are talking about; the people are happy here and there is plenty of food to eat. They have everything here that they have in America—everything but red ink." So that became the code in our