You know Pamela Adlon. You’ve seen her.

Maybe the first time was back in the early 80s when she was a teenager playing a Pink Lady in Grease 2 or Kelly Affinado on The Facts of Life. Or more recently: Marcy Runkle, Californication’s delightfully brash resident cokehead, or Pamela, Louie’s fictionalized version of herself. You’ve definitely heard her voice—at once distinctively raspy and surprisingly chameleonic—which has given life to a host of cartoons, including 90s kid classics Recess and Rugrats, the beloved Bob’s Burgers, and an Emmy Award-winning stint as Bobby Hill on King of the Hill, starting in 1997.

Or maybe you discovered her in 2016 with the celebrated arrival of her own show, FX’s Better Things, which for two seasons successfully tackled the complex, messy, funny, and poignant emotional terrain that a single working mother of three daughters traverses. A show that, a little over a year ago, seemed on the verge of combustion—collateral damage in yet another MeToo revelation.

The final episodes of Season Two aired under a looming shadow: Adlon’s longtime creative partner and co-creator of Better Things, Louis CK, had just admitted that allegations of sexual misconduct against him were true. It was unclear whether the show—unabashedly feminist, dreamed up by one of Hollywood’s hardest-working women—would survive the reckoning.

For Adlon, whose father was a noted comedy writer-producer, it had been a long road to her own show, one that started in the early 1980s while enrolled at Manhattan’s Professional Children’s School. (I was a student there, too; until I called her for this story, it had been 30 years since the last time we spoke, sitting next to each other in 10th-grade math class. “Ariel!” she exclaims, now, in greeting. “It’s fucking crazy. Are you ready?”)

In 1983, she landed her first big job as an understudy in the original company of Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs on Broadway. “I was with that play from Los Angeles to San Francisco to New York,” she says. “It was like having Broadway blue balls. I never went onstage.” The trajectory from high-school Pamela Segall to show-running supernova is not unsurprising. A self-described “bulldog” when it comes to survival, Adlon is driven by an insatiable work ethic—as a teenager, in between acting jobs she’d work part-time at vintage clothing stores and hand out flyers for the New York Pops.

She learned a trenchant life lesson—that nothing is to be taken for granted—when, in her 20s, her parents went bankrupt and lost their house. “When my dad turned 50, the switch got turned off for him,” she says.

The irony is not lost on her that at the same age her father found his career on the decline, hers began to blossom. “I spent years waiting for the phone to ring,” Adlon says. She describes sporadic work, at times going on unemployment, before finally getting a break: a voice-over job for radio led to steady voice-over work for animated shows. “That sustained me,” she says.

Throughout, Adlon was also raising three daughters as a single parent, which ultimately provided the material and training ground for creating and running production on Better Things. Knowing what to take on and what to say no to, making choices, living with consequences—all built up the muscles needed for leadership.

It was while acting and writing on FX’s Louie that she was given the opportunity to pitch her own show to the network, but she hesitated. Between her regular shows and her kids, her plate was full. But then she did a guest arc on a big-budget show and it hit her: “I looked around and saw all the money and time being wasted,” she says. “I got chills, and I thought, O.K., I can do this. I’m ready to do this.” She wrote the opening scene, in which Adlon’s character, Sam, sits on a bench in a mall scrolling through her phone as her youngest daughter stands next to her sobbing theatrically. When Sam meets the eye of a disapproving onlooker, she turns to her. “Hi,” she says, no nonsense. “Do you want to buy her the earrings?” This would become the voice of the show. “I wanted to see regular-people things,” Adlon says. “I don’t see people like me on television. Everything is a little too manicured.”