“Sopranos” star Jamie-Lynn Sigler had a difficult time during her first marriage, going so far as to have thoughts of her own death to escape.
Sigler is reflecting on that difficult time and others in her new memoir, “And So It Is.: A Memoir of Acceptance and Hope,” speaking with Us Weekly about revisiting those dark moments.
“I hadn’t relived that moment until I wrote it,” she told the outlet. “It wasn’t even really about suicide. It was a cry for help. I needed someone to know how terrified and overwhelmed I was.”
The 44-year-old star was just 22 years old when she tied the knot with A.J. Discala, her former money manager who is 10 years her senior.
Sigler felt like a “failure” during her marriage to Discala and didn’t think she’d have “survived” if they had stayed together.
“A marriage at 20 is still a marriage. I needed a lot of proof to leave. When I went through his phone, I knew something shady was going on. All women feel that way,” she recalled. “I wanted to share that not to bash him, but for other women. I felt like such a failure all the time, but I understood I was not going to survive much longer if I stayed in that marriage. I think he knew that, too.”
But Jamie-Lynn “desperately needed” Discala at the time, and even though she now feels he took advantage of her, she thinks they both got “caught up in a ride.”
“I desperately needed him at that time, so I can’t be like, ‘What were you thinking?’” she said. “I know what I needed, and he provided a lot of that for me. Can I look back and see a young girl who was possibly being taken advantage of? Yes, but I also don’t think that he really thought that was happening. I think we were both caught up in a ride, and I think our relationship was really toxic and complicated.”
The “MesSy” podcaster has been married to her husband, former baseball player Cutter Dykstra, for the past 10 years, and the couple share sons Beau, 21, and Jack, 8.
Sigler said she knew just two weeks after meeting Cutter that he was the right guy for her, even though she didn’t expect such a connection at first.
“I wanted somebody I could feel safe with and who excited me and who was fun. I don’t think I wrote down ‘athlete,’ but I was dating a lot of athletes at the time,” she said. “When I met Cutter, I didn’t think this was the guy — he was a 22-year-old minor league baseball player. But by two weeks in, [I knew it wasn’t a fling]. I was going to do whatever I needed to do to make it work with him.”
Follow us on Instagram @WeArePauseRewind for all your pop culture obsessions.