LITTLE COMPTON – Arden Myrin remembers the moment she sat her parents down inside their Little Compton home, preparing to present her case. She was an aspiring actress, she’d told them, and living in their quiet, Rhode Island seaside town just wasn’t cutting it. If she was going to get an agent and catch her break, then the family should really consider relocating to Los Angeles, Ms. Myrin reasoned.

She was in first grade.

Sure enough, years later, the 46-year-old is now living in L.A., her career as a comedic actress having taken off long ago. She’s landed roles in such hit shows as Gilmore Girls, Orange Is the New Black, Shameless and Netflix’s Insatiable, and toured the country as a standup comedian. She’s hosted the “Will You Accept This Rose?” podcast, where comedians break down episodes of the Bachelor/Bachelorette franchise; and has starred in the pre-Broadway play “Meteor Shower,” written by her childhood idol, Steve Martin.

But as Ms. Myrin prepares to release her memoir, “Little Miss Little Compton” on September. 29, she can say with conviction just how grateful she was to spend her childhood living in that quiet, Rhode Island seaside town.

“It was just the most idyllic place to grow up,” she said. 

A creative spirit

There is a certain level of fearlessness, Ms. Myrin found, that’s involved in surviving the acting world – and luckily for her, risk-taking runs in the family. A day after first meeting, her paternal grandparents decided to run away and tie the knot; her own mother and father were only coworkers at the time they married on a dare to get vacation time. Her father said they could either live in Manhattan or on the Little Compton coast; her mother not wanting to raise children in the city, Rhode Island it ultimately was.

“They stayed married for 50 years, happily married” Ms. Myrin said of her parents, both of whom remained in Little Compton until their deaths.

The family had settled in to their new community, her mother serving as a local real estate agent with her office situated right next to Wilbur’s Store. Both Ms. Myrin and her older brother were born in Little Compton, and her mother raised them to get out and spend their time using their imaginations, not restricting them with too many scheduled activities.

“My mom wanted us to be able to learn how to entertain ourselves,” Ms. Myrin said.

For her, that meant making crafts and climbing trees; wearing her brother’s old clothes and being mistaken for a boy. She can recall the scent of cider and the taste of corn on the cob from Walker’s Roadside Stand; the Town Landing holds a special place in her heart.

Yet acting was always the dream for Ms. Myrin, who remembers how blown away she was to see kids her own age performing in “Annie” on the Broadway stage.

While the family may not have relocated to California per her first grade request, Ms. Myrin said her mother in particular always encouraged her creative spirit. She’d show her daughter edited skits from “Saturday Night Live,” and introduced her to the comedy of Steve. Martin. Ms. Myrin grew up admiring comedic women powerhouses like Gilda Radner and Madeline Kahn. At the end of the day, she believes that having that kind of support can make all the difference when chasing your dreams. 

“It just takes just one human,” she said.

Overcoming obstacles

It took more than simply just support, however, to get Ms. Myrin to where she is today; there was a lot of hard work and ingenuity involved along the way. When she had difficulty getting cast in her high school plays, Ms. Myrin wrote her own; when she wasn’t loving the college she was attending, she studied improv in Chicago and interned at NBC’s Late Night with Conan O’Brien.

“It was a lot of sort of piecing together my own education,” Ms. Myrin said.

She developed a scrappiness, she said, that helped her figure things out along the way; she worked odd jobs (including one as an elf, at Macy’s Santaland) to make ends meet, not wanting to carry that burden into every audition. Once she began performing her own standup comedy, Ms. Myrin landed an agent, booking her first role on a sitcom in her early 20s.

Yet she said it wasn’t until she left kind, nurturing Little Compton and got out into the world that she began hearing nasty things, like that a woman couldn’t be funny.   

“That wasn’t part of my psyche growing up,” she said.

But Ms. Myrin refused to let the negative people keep her down, encouraging anyone else in a similar position to “go where the love is.” By showing up, being kind and taking a few leaps of faith, Ms. Myrin made her way. Perhaps it didn’t hurt that she’d sometimes bring along some Little Compton wishing stone rocks for good measure, too.

“It does really make me so thankful for the environment I grew up in,” Ms. Myrin said.

The next chapter

Ms. Myrin did not truly recognize, however, just how “unusual” that environment seemed to others until she began sharing bits and pieces of her upbringing on her podcast and in monologues. They couldn’t believe that her hometown had no streetlight, that it actually housed a general store.

“I think wherever you grow up, it’s normal for you,” she said. “You just think every place is like that.”

But those reactions sparked the idea for “Little Miss Little Compton,” and Ms. Myrin got to work on writing and pitching her proposal. It was on a somber note that she finally got the congratulatory email last March – while on her way to the Commons, heading to her mother’s funeral.

After that, Ms. Myrin said “Little Miss Little Compton” really evolved, one of her friends describing it as not her memoir, but her “mom-oir.”

“It really became her book,” she said.

With heart and humor, Ms. Myrin said that “Little Miss Little Compton” celebrates both her mother and her hometown, the place to which she still returns every year (pandemic year aside). Though her dreams are only growing (she’s writing and starring in her own dark comedy), Ms. Myrin said she will always feel like the most relaxed version of herself back home in Little Compton —  where the cell reception isn’t always great but the coffee at the Art Café always is; where she can catch sightings of a red train car filled with chickens, dubbed “the chicken caboose.”

“Everything good that I am I think came from her encouraging me, and then the magic and safety of growing up in this beautiful little town,” she said.