Review of You with the Sad Eyes by Christina Applegate

Applegate's memoir is more focused on her personal life than her acting, which has created structure in her life since childhood. She is brutally honest about recounting her health struggles as well as past trauma and the joy of her marriage and daughter.

Christina Applegate began acting as an infant, and she was fifteen when she began starring in the long-running sitcom Married...with Children. She went on to star in movies like Anchorman and in television series like Dead to Me.

But in You with the Sad Eyes, she reveals that her childhood in Laurel Canyon was filled with uncertainty, danger, and physical and sexual abuse.

Work meant structure and pay and stability, and Applegate yearned for all of this while at home her mother struggled with addiction, her stepfather was cruel and harmed her, and her caregivers abused her in ways that shaped her forever.

Acting has been the backbone of Applegate's life, but You with the Sad Eyes is far more focused on her personal life, with minimal behind-the-scenes Hollywood notes. She spends the most page time related to TV and movies on her experience contributing to developing Kelly Bundy as a character as a teen on Married...with Children.

Applegate was open about her breast cancer diagnosis years ago, although in her memoir she laments having put a positive spin on that struggle in high-profile interviews rather than getting into the gritty reality. She wonders now whether she might have caused other women in the midst of their own crises to feel that their suffering and turmoil were diminished by her public, somewhat whitewashed account.

Applegate is frank now about the difficulties and limitations of her multiple sclerosis, explaining how much of her life is now lived in bed because of pain and exhaustion, sharing the ways she connects with her beloved daughter, admitting how often she escapes into screens, and noting that she has time to reflect on her life's ups and downs now that she is largely homebound--and unable to work as an actor or to do many of the things she used to.

It feels ungenerous to note in the face of so much vulnerability, sassiness, and messy truth that the pacing of the book felt somewhat uneven to me. This is a brutally honest memoir, and in the audiobook, which is read by Applegate, the author repeatedly sobs as she shares her difficult memories and experiences. Yet she is sharply funny and full of reflections, hard-earned wisdom, and hopes for her daughter.

More Memoirs You Might Like

You might also want to check out these Bossy reviews of other celebrity memoirs or these lists of favorite memoirs the years I read them: this one and also this one.