Mary Jo Buttafuoco talks about her life and her Lifetime movie

Mary Jo Connery is fine, and she thanks you for asking. But under the circumstances — those going back almost 34 years, in fact — this is one question she does get a lot.

Her other name, the vastly better-known one, is Mary Jo Buttafuoco. She's still got a bullet lodged in her jaw from the shooting. And she's still got pain.

At least three TV movies were made — execrable ones — about the "Long Island Lolita," which to this day remains shorthand for the crime that once transfixed a nation and the tabloid TV industry. Yet another, "I Am Mary Jo Buttafuoco," arrives Saturday at 8 p.m. on Lifetime.

Aesthetic considerations aside, "I Am Mary Jo" is noteworthy because of the woman who appears on-screen between scenes. Connery elaborates on plot points, or simply explains that "what many didn’t see was the private toll it took — battling depression, suicidal thoughts and addiction as I tried to make sense of a life that had been so violently and publicly shattered."

Otherwise, the movie is strictly by the numbers: On May 19, 1992, Amy Fisher (Maddy Hillis), the 17-year-old lover of her husband, Joey (Dillon Casey), turns up on the front porch of the Buttafuocos' Massapequa home, then shoots Mary Jo ("General Hospital's" Chloe Lanier) in the side of the head. The last third (or so) of the movie tracks her recovery.

Connery, 70, a motivational speaker who for years has lived in Los Angeles County near her adult children, spoke recently to Newsday. She gamely addressed that other obvious question — another movie?

How are you doing?

I have a lot of issues, but I just keep pushing forward. I mean, if you survive getting shot in the head, you live with the ramifications of it, and I have issues. [But] I'm OK. I'm here. I managed to raise my children. I have grandchildren now. I'm so blessed, so happy.

Chronic pain?

Some days are good and some days are bad, but we all have those. Some days my head is ready to explode and I just have to calm down and lay down and rest, and other days I feel good and I can function.

Bring me up to speed with your life.

I had the second marriage [her husband of six years, Stu Tendler, died in 2018] …. No issues, no problem. He was a wonderful man. He wasn't anything like Joey, thank God. I don't have a pattern — could you imagine! One was enough. But honestly, now I am blissfully single and plan to stay that way.

Why another movie? The cynics among us — myself included — assume for the money.

It's legitimate and I said to myself, too, "Why am I doing this?" But [Lifetime] wanted to know what I went through — not about Joey and Amy. They wanted to know what kept me going. And you can't put 30 years in 90 minutes, but there's a whole generation that just thinks Buttafuco is a joke, a punch line. I wanted to separate myself from that, and have people understand that I just was, you know, painting in my backyard, minding my own business, and this happened and thrust me into this insanity.

Do young people — millennials, for example — even know what any of this was about?

When Lifetime came up to me, I said there's a generation that maybe should hear this story from the perspective of the victim. You know how it was — "Saturday Night Live," the jokes. ... You even immediately thought, "Oh, here we go again with the Buttafuocos." But sharing my story helps me heal, and I have a legacy now, too. I'd like people to know that Mary Jo Buttafuoco survived the unsurvivable and she hopefully did it with a little grace and a little compassion.

And for the trolls and the idiots out there that are going to say, "Oh, there she goes again," my message isn't for them. My message is not for the haters because they hate, but for people who are struggling, or going through their own hell on Earth. And if they say, "See, that lady did it," then I want to aspire to do that. That's really the whole motivation.

Ever get back to Long Island?

I was just there over the summer. I miss Long Island but it was so difficult to live there — having fingers pointing at you and making fun, or yelling at me. ... Wow, man, that was just a horrible time, but thank God it's decades ago. So I can kind of look at it with a perspective of, OK, all right. I went through that, but I made it. I keep in touch [with Joey's family], but they don't even keep in touch with him. Nobody does. ... He just does his own thing. He lives his own life. ... I don't wish him ill. I don't hate him. I'm just terribly sorry, disappointed.