You with the Sad Eyes: A Memoir

This is raw and fascinating and moving. Applegate has had a life full of the amazing and magical and the terrible and harrowing. She grew up in deprivation, with an absent father and an addict for a mother, and then an abusive addict for a stepfather. She worked to keep a roof over their heads. She was in violent, abusive relationships starting in her teens. She struggled with body issues and self-harm, she had cancer, which led to a double mastectomy, and now she has MS, which has stolen her autonomy and the privilege of being without pain. And she is best friends with Grace Slick's daughter and the former head bartender at the Viper Room. Her godfather, Stephen Stills, took her on tours and had to be yanked from the stage at her first show more wedding so the band could go on. She hung out with Johnny Depp and fooled around with Keanu. She was an original Pussycat Doll. She worked and remains friends with Will Farrel, Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, Cameron Diaz, Melissa McCarthy, and scores of others. She married her ultimate rock god and is in love with her lovely daughter. It is an amazing life. I can't imagine who doesn't find it interesting. Is she the world's greatest writer? She is not. But she tells her own story with grace and bracing brutal honesty, and that is more than enough.

One note: I listened to this, which is something I generally like to do with memoirs read by the author. I wish I had read it. Applegate is hella dramatic, and she tells heartbreaking stories descending into a tight, weepy, reedy voice, and then the next line comes, and she is back to her chipper self. I don't think she was being false at all, but that made it feel inauthentic. show less

A raw and honest memoir about actor Christina Applegate's life and career, which talks about both her experiences as an actor and a dancer, her time in an abusive relationship, and her battles first with breast cancer and now with multiple sclerosis. I appreciated her candour in her discussion of her regret in earlier framing her cancer diagnosis and double mastectomy as something that was any kind of "blessing", and her rejection of toxic positivity. But in terms of structure/editing, this could have been better, and Applegate never quite digs as deeply as she could into some of the issues/people she raises.

Well I'm sorry but that was quite enough of Christina Applegate. Loved her in Dead to Me and looked forward to reading it, but it felt like just a undigested dump of trauma and self-hatred without any perspective or reflection. I guess she senses her MS will get worse and worse and so she wanted to get her story out there - thus the interminable diary quotations. But enough.

Kiki (Christina) has written a soul-bearing view of her life an her being that mmany. people can relate to. "How can that be?" you might ask. She's a star! There are universals of human experience, however. Love. Loss. Mistakes. Regrets. Triumphs. She hold nothing back. Read This Book!

Christina retells her childhood growing up in Laurel Canyon and raised by a single mother. She believes that the three kinds of abuse she endured - mental, physical and sexual - contributed to her MS.