Over the last five years, Jane Lynch has excelled at playing bully Sue Sylvester on "Glee." But that wasn't the first experience the 54-year-old actor had with that less-than-admirable personality trait. "When I was a child, I was a bully at times myself," Lynch tells Speakeasy. "I could be kind of tough. Usually when I did that kind of intimidating, bullying behavior, it's because I didn't know how to fit in, I didn't know how to be heard."

Lynch has channeled those times growing up into her first children's book, "Marlene, Marlene, Queen of Mean," which follows a young girl who tries to fit in, but goes about it in all the wrong ways. "We wanted her to be tall and gangly," she says. "Her bow is a bit too big for her head, she has big freckles - she's an odd sort of girl, but a really bright light. A real smarty pants and will probably be running a corporation some day."

Lynch collaborated with her ex-partner Lara Embry and New York City-based author A.E. Mikesell, where they emailed back and forth ideas around the concept and plot, as well as wrote the book that way. Aside from a few tweaks, Lynch says Random House took it as is. Though Lynch isn't a parent herself, she gives credit to her co-authors for bringing in the perspective of what would work for a young audience in getting the message across.

"It was almost therapy for me," she says. "It's like 'Lets get into the mind of the bully for a second. What's going on with them?' Of course it was easy for me to because I had those moments as a child where I lashed out and was mean to kids, telling them what to do. [If] you speak to kids when they're young enough and [tell them] you can get this same kind of gratification by being a nice person, but also not stifling who you are."

Lynch recently returned to the "Glee" set, where she's shooting the sixth and final season of the series. "I'd love to see it where we see [the kids] settle into who they are," she says. "There's a restlessness about all of them. It would be nice to see them boldly step into their own lives. I'd love for [Sue] to have a redemption that sticks."