She writes of an early photo she has of herself, her mother and her stepfather, and how everyone\u2019s smiling despite her mother\u2019s drug addiction and the abuse her stepfather inflicted upon them. She writes of the ribald sitcom Married\u2026 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\u2019s 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<\/a>. The photos lied, then. They told stories that made everyone else feel better. <\/p>\n What\u2019s most powerful about You with the Sad Eyes is that it\u2019s not a book about late-in-life epiphanies. Applegate doesn\u2019t remark on how silly she used to be, or look back on her feelings about herself and her career with regret. Her body image issues didn\u2019t go away. Her professional restlessness, either. She doesn\u2019t speak about \u201cclarity\u201d or \u201cgratitude\u201d 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<\/a>. \u201cChristina Applegate is a character,\u201d she writes, \u201ca person who was beholden to people and production companies and everything and everyone else in this town. And she was someone I never was.\u201d<\/p>\n Applegate\u2019s acting career came to a premature end in 2021 when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a disease which attacks a person\u2019s 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. \u201cMost days,\u201d she explains, \u201csimply walking across the room feels like scaling a mountain.\u201d The cruel pointlessness of her condition reverberates through the book. \u201cThis disease has robbed me of who I am\u2026 of the things I loved,\u201d 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. \u201cIf you really want to know how I am: I had to pull s*** out of my own ass earlier today because of my disease.\u201d Applegate is a funny writer, with the rhythms of an insult comic \u2013 albeit one who doesn\u2019t punch down so much as punch themselves.<\/p>\n open image in gallery<\/p>\n Christina Applegate in her star-making role in the Eighties sitcom \u2018Married\u2026 with Children\u2019 (20thCentFox\/Everett\/Shutterstock)<\/p>\n Hollywood rarely seemed to harness that quality well. She\u2019s far funnier on TV as Rachel\u2019s evil sister Amy on Friends, or as a caustic, bitter widow on Netflix\u2019s Dead to Me, than she is as the prim straight woman to Will Ferrell\u2019s Ron Burgundy in the Anchorman movies. She writes of not wanting to star in Don\u2019t Tell Mom the Babysitter\u2019s Dead, the teen movie star vehicle made at the height of her Married\u2026 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\u2019t 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 \u2013 Applegate is great at rage, and a kind of manic desperation. She\u2019s not really sunny, or heroic. After all, there\u2019s far less there to sink your teeth into. <\/p>\n Her career, she implies, is one of her greatest disappointments. She notes there\u2019s always some cosmic cost to finding a rare part she adores. \u201cI think about the moments in my life when wonderful things have been followed by the dreadful,\u201d she writes. \u201cI 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.\u201d Her memories of Married\u2026 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\u2019s still reading to play Vince Vaughn\u2019s wife in a movie. In the audition room, Vaughn patronisingly explains to her what improvisation is. (She doesn\u2019t get the part.)<\/p>\n open image in gallery<\/p>\n Christina Applegate\u2019s memoir \u2018You with the Sad Eyes\u2019 (Headline)<\/p>\n![\"Christina](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/shutterstock_editorial_14500929cp.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Christina](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/238286481.jpeg\")
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