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Tribune News Service

Christina Applegate is where she has spent many listless, painful nights over the last year working on her memoir: in bed.
She passes most of her days inside a bedroom of her home in Laurel Canyon, a neighbourhood of Los Angeles in the Hollywood Hills.
It is already not a great day when we connect over video conference in late February – no day is free from the exhaustion and symptoms of multiple sclerosis, the autoimmune disease she was diagnosed with in 2021. This particular afternoon, she says, is “c*** on a cracker”.
“I’m sick as a big ol’ dog,” she explains. She raises up a heating pad – nicknamed Jake Ryan after the brooding heartthrob in the 1984 romcom Sixteen Candles – that has been warming her body.
“He dies a lot,” she says. “And then we have to get a new Jake Ryan. He’s actually on my abdomen right now and making me happy. I love Jake Ryan. He’s really my bestie.”
He may provide near-constant heat therapy, but readers of You with the Sad Eyes, she says, may take on the role of therapists.
For the nearly 300-page memoir, the 54-year-old actor broke open her personal journals, which she has kept since she was 13, and in turn, the vault that is her personal history, to share her story.

It was not an easy story to tell.
Yes, it is brushed with the unbridled humour and candour that fans of the Emmy-winning actor, with a résumé that includes Married… With Children and Dead to Me, have come to expect. But it finds the star unpacking dark chapters – an absent father, a chaotic home life, sexual abuse she experienced as a child, body image struggles, an abusive boyfriend – before reaching her life-altering MS diagnosis.
“This book is not cathartic for me – let’s just go there,” Applegate says. “I just needed to dump this s*** out somewhere. It’s almost like you guys are now my therapists in the world.
“I wrote it because someone said, ‘Do you want to write a book?’ I said, ‘Well, if I’m going to write a book, it’s going to have to start from day one.’ And day one ain’t pretty. There’s going to be really horrible s*** and then we’re going to have fun stuff – because that’s what my editor told me to have – and c*** again. That’s my life.”
The fun stuff? The book sprinkles some dishy and amusing moments amid the emotional heft – whether she is reflecting on her crush on Johnny Depp, who was eight years her senior, or the time she ditched Brad Pitt, her date at the 1989 MTV Video Music Awards, to leave with rocker Sebastian Bach instead. There are glimmers of light too – namely her daughter Sadie with husband Martyn LeNoble.

But trauma was a part of Applegate’s story early on.
She grew up in Laurel Canyon, LA’s storied bohemian enclave and music mecca. Her father, Bob, was a music promoter turned producer, while her mother, Nancy, was a singer and actor.
It was an upbringing marred by instability, pain and trauma. Her father abandoned the family when she was a baby; her mother, whom Applegate writes about with empathy and tenderness, struggled with drug and alcohol abuse and the long-term effects of an ensuing abusive relationship.
“The safety supplied by my beautiful mother was critically challenged by the presence of this man who moved into our lives and brought with him a universe of hurt and danger,” she writes in the book of her “stepfather” from the age of three to seven.
Applegate has been acting since infancy. She made her on-screen debut at three months old in 1972, playing a baby boy alongside her mother in an episode of Days of Our Lives. By kindergarten, she became a member of the Screen Actors Guild. The fictional worlds she got lost in would become an instrumental escape from her reality at various points in her life.
Her career really began to flourish in the late 1980s and early 90s when, despite having an aversion to comedy and initially turning down the role, she starred as Kelly Bundy in Married… With Children, a boundary-pushing sitcom that was critical to establishing the identity of the nascent Fox network.

After playing the ultra-cool but shallow character for 11 seasons, she went on to other starring roles: in both films, including Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead, Anchorman and Bad Moms, and television, such as Jesse, Samantha Who?, Up All Night and Dead to Me. She was even nominated for a Tony Award for best leading actress in a musical for the 2005 Broadway revival of Sweet Charity.
It all led to Applegate receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2022.
But she has not acted since wrapping Netflix’s Dead to Me the same year. It was during production on the show’s third and final season that she received her MS diagnosis and began treatment.
Applegate talks about living with MS with more bluntness than how she approached discussing her journey with breast cancer, which she was diagnosed with in 2008 at age 36. There is no sugarcoating. No platitudes about blessings. Just the truth. For her, it is just one piece of a larger effort to get people to connect honestly.
“We need a community. We need a bunch of us talking to each other – caretakers and children of people with MS and all this stuff. I just want to have a kumbaya with everybody right now because there’s so much sadness with this disease.”

But she does not want to delve too deeply into her experience with it at this juncture, she says – a publicist chimes in to mention Applegate will be launching a new online platform, Next in MS, where others can detail their own experience living with the disease. She will share more about her journey and what she has learned then.
Applegate says after work wrapped on the book – a two-and-a-half-year process – she slept. But the challenging days returned when it was time to record the audio version.
“That was the most hurtful thing – I don’t even know if that’s the word,” she says. “Sitting down and just reading it out loud and reliving it. It’s a really hard experience.”
It eventually led to reflection on the idea of “happiness”.
“If someone asked me if I’ve ever been happy, I would say ‘no’. I’m sorry. And I know that’s a big statement to have. There’s a part of the book that I talk about being in Big Sur [a mountainous section of California’s coast] and going, ‘I feel happy.’ I don’t think I felt that way again – but that’s a big thing we all have to talk about.
“‘What is happy?’ And, no, I have not been happy since that moment, except for the birth of my child, and every time she kisses me on my forehead and my nose and my cheeks or she hugs me and she says, ‘I love you, mama’ and she goes, ‘Let’s go listen to the Cure,’ ‘Let’s go dance,’ ‘Let’s go be weird.’ Those are my happy moments. She is my lifetime.”

She says she allowed her daughter to read through some of her old journals. But Sadie has not read the book – though Applegate has signed a copy for her. “She’s like, ‘Oh, mom, thank you so much.’ And then she threw it across the room; not in an effigy, just in a… she’s dealing with school.
“Without outing my child – because I don’t want to speak for all her feelings because that’s not fair – she’s lost her mom. I’m not dead. But I’m not the person that I was five years ago when I was dancing with her and hiking with her and playing tennis with her and doing things. She’s lost her mom. And it’s f*****g hard on her, man. And it’s hard for her to talk about it as well. That’s as far as I’m going to talk about it.”
With our 37-minute session coming to an end, she perks up, thinking she hears her daughter, 15, arriving home from school. False alarm. It appears one of her body parts – which she has given unique nicknames, like Meghan Markle (right leg) and Tootie from The Facts of Life (left leg), to scold when they are acting up – was giving her a hard time.
“Meghan has been so sweet to Tootie because Tootie is an a** today,” she says. “I can’t even walk into the bathroom with Tootie. But Meghan, I’m like, ‘Girl, you got this.’”


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FILE -  Christina Applegate appears at the Annual Backstage at the Geffen Gala in Los Angeles on March 22, 2010. (AP Photo/Matt Sayles, File)

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The cover of You with the Sad Eyes. Photo: TNS

Applegate appears at the Backstage at the Geffen Gala in Los Angeles on March 22, 2010. Photo: AP

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Applegate speaks onstage during the 75th Primetime Emmy Awards at the Peacock Theatre in Los Angeles on January 15, 2024. Photo: TNS

Applegate and Will Ferrell in a still from Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004).

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Lifestyle

Entertainment

American actress Christina Applegate opens up about abuse, trauma and living with multiple sclerosis as she releases her memoir


American actress Christina Applegate opens up about abuse, trauma and living with multiple sclerosis as she releases her memoir.


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Christina Applegate’s life story: horrible stuff, some fun, then awful again

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}American actress Christina Applegate opens up about abuse, trauma and living with multiple sclerosis as she releases her memoir

American actress Christina Applegate opens up about abuse, trauma and living with multiple sclerosis as she releases her memoir