Then it all stopped. A Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis in 2021 confined her to a king-sized bed and the company of memories she’d rather forget: memories of the self-doubt and body dysmorphia that stalked her meteoric rise, of her mother’s fight against addiction and abuse after her father left, and of the tax life had taken on her body and mind that was suddenly coming due.
Now, at her most intimate and vulnerable, she unveils a story not even those closest to her fully know. She returns to the diaries she kept her whole life, finding the pain matched by joy, the losses mitigated by the extraordinary, and the weight of life lifted by her unrelenting belief that something greater lay ahead. No longer willing to lock herself away and with the perspective only our own mortality can bring, she knew it was imperative to tell it all.
You with the Sad Eyes presents a remarkable woman and her legacy. In her own words, “I truly believe that books can make people feel less alone. That’s why I’m doing this. You with the Sad Eyes won’t be some big violin scratching for my life. But it will be real. It will be filled with the ups and downs, the humor and grief of life.
So here I am.
Real me.
Lots to say.” (Synopsis courtesy of Amazon.)
Melissa Amster:
I've seen many shows and movies featuring Christina Applegate. My favorite is Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead. So I was interested in reading her memoir and finally got a chance to on Audible. It was nice to hear her narrate her own life story and felt more impactful coming directly from her voice.
This book gets intense early on. Christina talks about a lot of things that are listed in the trigger warnings at the bottom of this post. If you're going to read or listen, please go easy on yourself and take breaks. It's just a lot! Especially the "orange curtain" chapter.
Christina jumps around in time a lot, which makes things confusing. Especially when listening to it vs. being able to go back and look at dates. So if you're going to listen, you may want to read along and pause as needed. She also goes off on tangents or completely switches topics in the chapter. She started a chapter talking about The Sweetest Thing and then switched to talk about her wedding with no segue.
I appreciated Christina's honesty and vulnerability. Some parts felt uncomfortable to listen to because of her candidness with sharing too much information. It's also strange to me to hear people cry on an audiobook. I understand her emotion, but it felt like too much sometimes.
I really liked the chapter about Sweet Charity, as well as the ones learning what happened behind the scenes of shows and movies, especially Dead to Me. I also loved hearing her talk about her daughter, who is close in age to mine. That felt so relatable and I also heard her mom pride shining through.
It was sad to learn about how she found out she had MS and all the limitations it has since put on her.
Overall, this was a tough one to listen to, but I feel like I got to know the real Christina, including the name she prefers to go by when she's not performing.
When I was listening to the book, there was this video that came to mind and I couldn't remember if I really saw it or was just dreaming. Turns out, it really exists. In the video, she's performing 1960s songs with Kristin Chenoweth and Carrie Underwood. Check it out! (Start at 2:25.)
Sara Steven:
Like many people who grew up in the 1980s, I am a big fan of Christina Applegate. Watching Married...with Children when you’re a kid felt a little scandalous back then, but a lot was allowed in those days. Even now, when I visit with my parents, my dad will say, “Thank your father, kids,” and in response I’ll say, “Thanks, Dad,” just like Kelly and Bud would do on the show. In Christina’s book, she mentions how the character of Kelly was meant to be a biker chick who later morphed into a sex symbol who never really fully committed to that role, and even then, I could see exactly what she meant by that. Kelly was all about the illusion, and I found it interesting that for Christina, the majority of her childhood and younger years had been built around that same premise; an illusion. You never knew what was really going on for her and for her life behind the celebrity.
There were a lot of surprising elements to You with the Sad Eyes. I did not know how funny Christina is; not just what we’ve seen in movies like Anchorman, but the way she described her world as a whole was deeply personal, at times tragic, painful, but always with a tinge of humor. I imagine it’s a coping mechanism to get through some tough days, and through her explained chaos that has ensued since her recent MS diagnosis, it would not surprise me one bit. We only know what we’re privy to, and often it’s online articles that will tell us how Christina is doing, so it was enlightening to actually hear it from her own perspective, without the interruption of news-worthy fodder.
I enjoyed reading about her life, and her experiences in shows like Married...with Children and movies like Bad Moms, which by the way, I loved her in. I think I would have liked to hear a little bit more–I felt like maybe to give her costars privacy, she didn’t say as much, but it would have been nice to learn more about some experiences she’d had on the sets of shows and movies that I loved seeing her in. I do feel like I learned some new things about her, like her background in dance. I had no idea that she was so passionate about it, or that she’d co-founded The Pussycat Dolls. I could tell by her descriptions and the yearning she has for dance, just how important it is to her, and in the moments where she reflects on the past and now having MS, I felt those painful emotions from her.
What I appreciated most about this book is the blunt honesty Christina gives her readers. Even when she tells us about the various times in her life when she wished she would have been more candid and open about things, she doesn’t sugarcoat it. She doesn’t sugarcoat her upbringing, her childhood, or the toxic relationships she’s been in. Ultimately, she lets the world know that love her or hate her, she chooses to be herself, whether we like it or not, and I think it’s that type of brute inner strength that has carried her through dealing with an autoimmune disease. She says that being on Dead to Me was her best work ever, and while I do agree, I’m hopeful that we will see more from her in the near future.
(Trigger warnings below. May contain spoilers.)
Listen to this book on Speechify!
🎥
🎥
🎥
🎥
🎥
🎥
🎥
🎥
🎥
🎥
TW: Molestation, toxic/abusive relationship, alcohol and drug use, addiction, death of friend, cancer, multiple sclerosis, parental abandonment, miscarriage. (A lot happened in this book so if we missed something, we apologize.)
No comments:
Post a Comment