Christina Applegate was a ’90s icon in my world. She was the cool/beautiful girl who played Kelly Bundy on Married… With Children. She starred in Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead. She had a list of famous boyfriends.
I’ve watched nearly every show she headlined — Jesse, Samantha Who?, Up All Night, Dead to Me — and her big-screen comedies, from The Sweetest Thing to Anchorman. Through work, I followed the public chapters: divorce, motherhood, remarriage, breast cancer and, since 2021, multiple sclerosis (MS).
That familiarity gave me the mistaken impression that I somehow knew her story. Then I opened her memoir, You With the Sad Eyes, out now.
Applegate has lived a far more layered — and painful — life than the headlines suggested. She writes about childhood trauma, sexual abuse, body dysmorphia, relationship abuse, illness and survival, all threaded through fame.
The book doesn’t tie itself up with easy lessons. The 54-year-old actress, whose diaries appear throughout, writes that she “will probably go away” because of MS, a chronic neurological disease in which the immune system mistakenly attacks healthy cells.
The heavy stuff
Living with MS “sucks,” Applegate writes. “Every little stinking part of it sucks.” The disease has “robbed me of who I am,” and “forced me into this prison of a bed.” Her daily pain level often sits at an 8 out of 10. Steroid treatment initially caused her significant weight gain. Stomach complications later led to dramatic weight loss and repeated hospital visits. She hasn’t worked since Dead to Me — what she calls the “role of a lifetime” — and isn’t sure she will again.
Try not to cry when the MeSsy podcast host writes that her 15-year-old daughter Sadie’s “heart is broken at what has become of me.”
Applegate and her daughter, Sadie, at the 2023 Screen Actors Guild Awards.
(Myung J. Chun via Getty Images)
Before she contracted MS, Applegate suffered breast cancer and a double mastectomy in 2008. Applegate admits she “didn’t look in the mirror for a year.” When she first held Sadie skin to skin as a newborn, she noticed a nurse crying as she looked at her scarred chest — a moment that underscores how complicated her relationship with her body has been.
That all began long before her illnesses. Applegate, who grew up in L.A.’s Laurel Canyon, was sexually abused by a babysitter at 5. It left her, she said, “never fully comfortable” in her body or being touched.
Applegate grew up in what she describes as an “abusive and scary” home after her father left when she was a baby. Her mother, singer Nancy Priddy, struggled with heroin addiction and domestic abuse. Applegate witnessed both the violence and adults using drugs around her.
As a teen, Applegate was encouraged to diet, with her mom suggesting she get liposuction. It led to a lifetime struggle with body dysmorphia. While playing Kelly Bundy, a character built around being ogled, she was starving herself, exercising for hours and sometimes not eating all day. A size 0, she still hated her body and didn’t think she was pretty.
Applegate does not blame Married… With Children, noting that she chose to lean into the bombshell image. But it was all-consuming.
“Sure, it was always part of the show that I would be an object for men to leer at, but I was the one who wanted to wear those Kelly Bundy dresses to represent something in the zeitgeist,” she writes. “My sickness for perfection was always the driving force in my life.”
Applegate on the set of Married… With Children, with her TV dad, Ed O’Neill, and David Faustino, who played her brother.
(©20thCentFox/Courtesy Everett Collection)
Sometimes it still is. “I have never known how to deal with the fact that I am a successful person yet I hate myself,” she writes.
Even in adulthood, trauma followed her. She details one abusive relationship in which she feared for her life, describing one night when her boyfriend came at her with a shard of glass. Another time, he poured a bottle of alcohol down her throat. She writes about how long it took to walk away. She also shared that she had an abortion while they were together.
She also recounts events she cannot fully remember, like a blackout — or blocked memory — while she was with the late TV producer Kim Manners. She woke up with “marks all over my butt” and knew “something bad had happened.”
The memoir’s title comes from her mother telling her she was born a “sad little girl.” Applegate wrote that she sees it differently: “I was introduced to the weight of the world much too early in life.”
The lighter (but still revealing) stories
The book isn’t without Hollywood stories — although they feel like a side plot.
She was friends with Brad Pitt before he was “Brad Pitt!” and famously ditched him at the 1989 MTV Video Musical Awards for Skid Row’s Sebastian Bach. Pitt was left having to drive Applegate’s mom home and, she said, was “subsequently very mad at me” — “for many years.” (Her relationship with Bach was short-lived. She found out he had a 1-year-old child with his long-term partner.)
Applegate writes about ditching Brad Pitt at the MTV VMAs for a rock star.
(Barry King via Getty Images)
Like the rest of the world at the time, Applegate was in love with Johnny Depp at 15. The difference: She was actually friends with him. She appeared on 21 Jump Street and hung out with him in Vancouver. In L.A., they were in the same circle, and she was a regular at his L.A. club, the Viper Room.
Dance — once her biggest passion — led Applegate to become an original member of the Pussycat Dolls. For 10 years, they performed their burlesque troupe act weekly before Robin Antin turned the group into its pop incarnation.
Applegate dated the singer Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who was nine years her senior, when she was 17. The first thing he ever said to her was: “I want to go out with you.” After he dumped her, he asked her to do his laundry. “And like a stupid f***ing fan, I did it,” she admits. She writes that she “loved the assholes and f***ups.”
She married the actor Johnathon Schaech in 2001, even though she knew on their wedding day that she shouldn’t. The signs were there, she writes, recalling their first date and how she hated his terrible shoes.
Her dark humor surfaces often. Applegate names all her body parts so she can give them hell as they give her trouble. One leg is “Meghan Markle.” “Tootie” (the Facts of Life character) is another body part. She calls her brain “f****** asshole.” Her heating pad “is Jake Ryan,” a nod to John Hughes’s Sixteen Candles.
Set war stories
While Applegate loved the Married… With Children cast, by the end, she was done with Kelly Bundy. She showed up for the final season having shaved her head — surprise! — and had to wear a wig. After the show — which she said could never be made today — had ended, she turned down Legally Blonde because she was done playing “dumb blondes.” That was a decision that, she as she jokes about it today, cost her “Reese Witherspoon money.”
Making Anchorman was a career highlight, but she was lowballed on her offer. When she initially turned down the part, her costar Will Ferrell and the director, Adam McKay ,offered to give her part of their paychecks to get her to say yes.
Applegate says Will Ferrell supplemented her Anchorman salary when the studio lowballed her.
(Vince Bucci via Getty Images)
Applegate said that when she made 2016’s Bad Moms, the filmmakers spent $30,000 to digitally enhance her appearance to make her look younger. That fed her ongoing self-doubt.
One of the best throwaway anecdotes is about the problems she ran into with her Surviving Christmas costar Ben Affleck, and his “abnormally large head.” “They had to put me in a certain position for the posters, because his head was so much bigger than mine.” (Somewhere right now, Affleck is making his meme face.)
What reading the memoir made me revisit
I read You With the Sad Eyes with my search window open — not necessarily for gossip, but for context. Things I looked up while I was reading:
Is Applegate still married? Applegate writes about living with her daughter and navigating MS at home, so I found myself wondering about her marriage. The latter part of the book gets into her “kismet love” story with Dutch bassist Martyn LeNoble, of Porno for Pirates fame, but I initially wasn’t sure they were still together. She ultimately gives a lot of insight into falling for “the dude who lost his teeth but doesn’t even remember how he lost them,” including how they met years before they got together, when LeNoble was going through personal struggles. They reconnected years later.
Applegate, at her 2022 Hollywood Walk of Fame Star Ceremony, with her daughter, Sadie, her husband, Martyn LeNoble, her stepdaughter, Marlon, and her mom, Nancy Priddy.
(VALERIE MACON via Getty Images)
The Brad and Johnny years. Seeing the photos again — early Pitt, Jump Street era Depp — made me scour the internet for some of her old red carpet pix.
Lee Grivas. Applegate writes about her ex dying of an overdose in 2008, and how he haunts her house today (in a good way).
Who was in the cast of Just Visiting? Applegate tells a story about someone being “cruel” to her on the film’s London set. One clue: It’s not costar Jean Reno, who she says stuck up for her.
Her Oprah Winfrey interview. After Applegate’s breast cancer diagnosis, she appeared on Oprah in 2008. In the memoir, she calls the sitdown performative, noting that referring to her diagnosis as a “blessing” didn’t serve her or anyone else.
Old clips. Applegate earned her SAG card at 7, but had started appearing in ads and on TV long before that. As an infant, she appeared on Days of Our Lives with her mom.
Her mother, Nancy Priddy. Reading about her mother’s struggles sent me searching for her music and backstory. She famously performed with Leonard Cohen and released her own album. She was in a relationship with Crosby, Stills and Nash’s Stephen Stills, who Applegate still calls “Uncle Dadu.”