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While reading You with the Sad Eyes, the new memoir by the actor Christina Applegate, I kept thinking about old photographs. In Applegate’s life and in her career, there are repeated gulfs between the thoughts of things and the facts of things, and the cameras that capture them.
She writes of an early photo she has of herself, her mother and her stepfather, and how everyone’s smiling despite her mother’s drug addiction and the abuse her stepfather inflicted upon them. She writes of the ribald sitcom Married… with Children, which made her a star and cast her as a prototypical dumb blonde who defined American sex appeal in the late Eighties. Those memories are punctuated by old diary entries that express her embarrassment about starring in it; she insists she’s actually a poet and a rock chick and is desperate to be in serious movies. She writes of being known as thin, beautiful and desirable, while despising her body and doing everything she can to shrink it. The photos lied, then. They told stories that made everyone else feel better.
What’s most powerful about You with the Sad Eyes is that it’s not a book about late-in-life epiphanies. Applegate doesn’t remark how silly she used to be, or look back on her feelings about herself and her career with regret. Her body image issues didn’t go away. Her professional restlessness, either. She doesn’t speak about “clarity” or “gratitude” or use any of the pseudo-spiritual buzzwords that tend to flow from the mouths of veterans of LA. Instead she is pissed off, annoyed; she is angry about the way her life has turned out. “Christina Applegate is a character,” she writes, “a person who was beholden to people and production companies and everything and everyone else in this town. And she was someone I never was.”
Applegate’s acting career came to a premature end in 2021 when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a disease which attacks a person’s nervous system, slows down their functions, and can manifest in a host of different ways. For Applegate, it has left her in a constant state of pain and exhaustion, and has made moving difficult. “Most days,” she explains, “simply walking across the room feels like scaling a mountain.” The cruel pointlessness of her condition reverberates through the book. “This disease has robbed me of who I am… of the things I loved,” she writes. She mourns her ability to run, and play tennis, and play guitar. She mourns the mother she can no longer be for her teenage daughter. She writes that she now wears adult nappies, as her MS causes incontinence. “If you really want to know how I am: I had to pull s*** out of my own ass earlier today because of my disease.” Applegate is a funny writer, with the rhythms of an insult comic – albeit one who doesn’t punch down so much as punch themselves.
Hollywood rarely seemed to harness that quality well. She’s far funnier on TV as Rachel’s evil sister Amy on Friends, or as a caustic, bitter widow on Netflix’s Dead to Me, than she is as the prim straight woman to Will Ferrell’s Ron Burgundy in the Anchorman movies. She writes of not wanting to star in Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead, the teen movie star vehicle made at the height of her Married… with Children fame, because she found it cheesy. She loved Samantha Who, the short-lived comedy series where she played a ruthless mean girl with amnesia. She doesn’t mention at all Jesse or Up All Night, the other short-lived comedy series in which she played bland everywomen. I sort of understand her disinterest – Applegate is great at rage, and a kind of manic desperation. She’s not really sunny, or heroic. After all, there’s far less there to sink your teeth into.
Christina Applegate’s memoir ‘You with the Sad Eyes’ (Headline)
Her career, she implies, is one of her greatest disappointments. She notes there’s always some cosmic cost to finding a rare part she adores. “I think about the moments in my life when wonderful things have been followed by the dreadful,” she writes. “I finally made it to Broadway [in the musical Sweet Charity], only to get a terrible injury; I finally got the role of a lifetime in Dead to Me, only to find out I had MS halfway through.” Her memories of Married… with Children are clouded by her eating disorder and a long concurrent relationship with an abusive man. Samantha Who is trailed by breast cancer and the overdose death of an ex-boyfriend. Anchorman is a sensation, a modern classic, but within five years she’s still reading to play Vince Vaughn’s wife in a movie. In the audition room, Vaughn patronisingly explains to her what improvisation is. (She doesn’t get the part.)
I don’t mean to make Applegate’s memoir sound bleak. There are fantastically funny stories about dumping a pre-fame Brad Pitt at an awards show, or the time she learnt the full lyrics of a lewd folk song with Cameron Diaz. There is also lovely writing about Applegate meeting her husband, the musician Martyn LeNoble, and raising their daughter. I do mean to make the memoir sound real, in a way that acknowledges that life can often be unfathomably cruel, and that you’d have to be either incredibly lucky or incredibly delusional to end up calling your own hardships a blessing.
At one point Applegate remembers appearing on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show in the wake of her cancer surgery in 2008. During the appearance, she quoted the serene rock singer Melissa Etheridge, and suggested that her cancer was actually spiritually good for her, an opportunity to change how she lives, how she eats, how she deals with fear and stress. “Here’s how I feel about that interview now,” Applegate writes. “It was bulls***.”
‘You With the Sad Eyes’ is out now, via Headline