You with the sad eyes, p.1
You with the Sad Eyes, page 1
Author’s Note: This is true to what I believe happened. I have changed some names and descriptions. And I have reconstructed dialogue to the best of my recollection and reordered or combined the sequence of some events. Others who were present might recall things differently. But this is my story.
Copyright © 2026 by Christina Applegate
Cover design by June Park
Cover photograph by Steve Shaw
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Photo insert credits: here courtesy of Sam Sarkar; here courtesy of Adir Abergel; here, here courtesy of Adir Abergel. All other photographs courtesy of the author.
Reproduction of Andrew Wyeth’s CHRISTINA’S WORLD © 2025 Wyeth Foundation for American Art / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.
ISBN 9780316594943 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2025950661
E3-20260124-JV-NF-ORI
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
ONE: Star, Fucker!
TWO: Lala Land
THREE: The Bathroom Floor
FOUR: Quit
FIVE: Married… with Children
SIX: Nostradamus
SEVEN: The Orange Curtains
EIGHT: Hawaii
NINE: Filthy McNasty
TEN: Red Wedding
ELEVEN: Bing Bang Boom
TWELVE: Metatarsal #5
THIRTEEN: Kibitz Kismet
FOURTEEN: Right Action for Women
FIFTEEN: Pinch
SIXTEEN: Who Do I Think I Am?
SEVENTEEN: Dead To Me
EIGHTEEN: The Lady in the Bathtub from The Shining
Photos
Acknowledgments
Discover More
About the Author
This is for Sadie. Everything I do is for Sadie. Writing this book is for Sadie. These next words are for Sadie:
My darling child, you are my reason, my season, and my lifetime.
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Andrew Wyeth, Christina’s World, 1948
Christina has a bonny face
Nobody knows the secret place
Nancy Priddy, “Christina’s World,” 1968
“What we all want is someone who will accept us for what we are and what we have become.”
From my diary, Wednesday, August 6, 2008
PROLOGUE
MY MOM ALWAYS TOLD me that I was a sad little girl.
“You were just born that way,” she’d say.
But I actually don’t believe that’s true. I was introduced to the weight of the world much too early on in life. I think being left by my father and growing up in a household that was abusive and scary and awful may have loaned me those sad eyes. Even if I hadn’t admitted it to myself, my sad eyes had been revealing the true me all along.
Looking back, I guess I’ve faked it until I made it my whole life. When you’ve been through the kinds of things I’ve been through, you have to get good at hiding behind a persona, and my Christina Applegate persona was successful, especially in shielding me from having to face the past.
That was then. But now? I embrace my sad eyes—I’ve earned them.
In my public life, I’ve played the character “Christina Applegate” for so long, since I was a very young child. The comic actor, the serious actor, the all-singing, all-dancing, ultimate performer, the good talk show interview—I was all those things. I even wrote a paper in school professing myself a “triple threat” and saying I wanted to be Meryl Streep.
That person is unrecognizable to me now.
I am not Christina Applegate.
Recently, I noticed that a dear friend of mine had me listed as “Christina Applegate” in her phone.
“Take that out,” I said. “And don’t you ever call me by those two names together.” It took her a moment, but she understood.
Anyone who truly knows me knows I am not Christina Applegate.
I was never, ever that person. Whenever I hear “Christina Applegate” I get spine tingles, and not in a good way. Those two words together do not denote the secret place, the center of my soul, the real me.
Instead, there’s one nickname I save for my true essence. Usually, I don’t want the world to see who I really am, so I have kept it secret. But when those closest to me use my nickname, just two short syllables, I feel they know me in the deepest and most beautiful way.
I promise by the end of this book you’ll know those two syllables, too, and not just in name. I’ll finally reveal every reason for those sad eyes, will describe the full spectrum of a life seen through them—the good, the bad, the ups, the downs, the everything.
It’s not a process I’m looking forward to, being that vulnerable. But I want to reveal who I am, fully, for the first time. Maybe I don’t even know who that is, but hey, I have nothing left to lose.
In 2021, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. MS attacks your nervous system and slows down your functions—your respiratory system, your organs, everything. The disease eats away at all the things we take for granted. Some of us with MS have a raft of pain; some don’t. I have a lot of it. When I wake up, I often can’t get my arm to move far enough to grab the cup of water by my bed or my phone from its charger. I have infusions every six months to slow the disease’s progress, but those infusions kill all the B cells in my body, making me prone to infection. My stomach frequently slows to a halt, leaving me to regularly rush to the emergency room in agony. Most days, simply walking across the room feels like scaling a mountain.
One of the worst side effects of the illness is the exhaustion. It feels as though I’ve been on a three-day-long sleepless bender, but no bender for me—that’s how I feel after a good night’s sleep. Hence all the time I spend on and in bed, snuggled up against Jake Ryan, which is what I call my heating pad. A sidenote that if you were born in the seventies, as I was, Sixteen Candles was the shit. In the last moment of the movie, Jake Ryan, wearing bad jeans in front of a red Porsche, looks at Sam Baker (played by Molly Ringwald) and says, “Yeah, you.” If you don’t know what that means, put this book down right now and go watch the movie. It’s much more uplifting.
As you may be catching on, on the back of that diagnosis and the symptoms I face, I no longer care what I say or how I come across or how it makes anyone feel. I don’t have patience for bullshit anymore, no patience for things that are meaningless or merely “extra.” Add to that, I don’t have room for inauthenticity or hidden meanings. There’s no longer subtext when I speak. Everything I say is true, and unadorned, and real.
This is new for me, as I’ve always been a private person. When I was growing up, we didn’t have trolls, cellphones, social media. Instead, we just had the Z Channel, which was famous for airing the seminal music video, “Brass in Pocket” by the Pretenders. There was no MTV, no Bravo, no Real Housewives—just that video airing once in a while in between televised movies. I didn’t live a public life the way celebrities have to now. At the time, everything was more private.
In many ways, I know I seem to have lived a perfect life, and I’ve been told that this has inspired some people to look up to me. The truth is, I never felt seen. Just as I know that so many people who have suffered in different ways haven’t felt seen either. I succeeded in life despite what I went through, but it’s time to tell the truth, even if while writing this I feel like I’m giving a TED talk. I promise, I’m not!
And it’s not just because I’m no longer working. Sure, there’s no one breathing down my neck to represent their business or their movie or their TV show, things I’ve had to represent, usually willingly and passionately, for almost fifty years. It goes deeper. I’ve become an honesty missile. When your physical situation deteriorates, and your life shrinks to the size of a California king, suddenly all the things you thought were important shift, too. The truth clarifies, like a camera lens slowly focusing.
I know it’s a cliché that clowns are sad, but my outward success and humor masked a tough life, and an abiding sense that I wasn’t good enough. I hid all that for the good of whatever movie or TV show or play I was representing. Now, those days are gone. I have one friend who insists I’ll work again, but he doesn’t see the full extent of my pain.
In fact, my body has let me down so much that I’ve taken to naming the various parts so I can yell at them. My entire body is Sylvia, so if I have weird things going on, my friends will yell, “Stop, Sylvia, stop it!”
Sometimes I get weird shakes in Barbara (my right arm), and once in a while Stanley (left arm) joins in.
My right leg is Meghan Markle.
Don’t ask.
My left leg is Tootie, from The Facts of Life.
My gallbladder is named Gail, my liver Olivia. My kidneys are Calliope. I haven’t named my intestines yet, and I probably should because I’m mad at them all the time.
Stacey’s a bitch, but Staceys are always bitches, aren’t they? Stacey is my stomach.
When Barbara and Stanley and Meghan and Tootie and Gail and Olivia and Calliope and Stacey are doing weird things, I try to talk to them, and because I have a disease of the nervous system, it’s almost like they listen. When I was first diagnosed, Barbara would shake constantly, and one of my friends, Carolyn, would yell, “Barbara! Be quiet!” Sometimes it would help.
My brain has a name, too: Stuart, aka Fucking Asshole.
This disease has robbed me of who I am, has robbed me of my life, of the things I loved. I was invincible. I loved running. I loved Peloton, I played tennis, and I loved—I mean really loved—to dance.
I want to pick up the guitar over there by the wall, but my hands cramp. I used to love saying to Sadie, my amazing daughter, “Yes, of course I’ll take you wherever you want to go in the car.” Now, I often can’t drive her anywhere.
But I like to watch TV—the worse the better, usually reality shows like Real Housewives—because with TV I get to escape. I don’t have to think. I don’t want narratives, art, series in which you invest in some antihero across seven brilliant seasons. I want rich women screaming at each other.
I keep the TV on twenty-four hours a day because without it the quiet is so loud in my head I can’t bear it.
Would I have wanted it this way, to have everything stripped away? Did I envision finally arriving at a place of raw honesty about my life, and that would be a good thing? Fuck no. I want to work and dance and take Sadie everywhere, but being forced into this home-based life has stripped away my last vestiges of reserve. It has afforded me time and space to look back on my life and take stock of it for the first time. Alongside the need to confront the truth and enormity of all that I have lived through, a beautiful thing emerged: I have started to make a little sense of it, to understand what happened, see patterns, discover meaning, find the love and acceptance and healing in it, and start to forgive myself, to give my young self, especially, some slack for all the bad decisions and self-destructive behaviors.
In my closet there is a locked box of all my journals from the age of thirteen to the time I stopped wanting to write. I had told my best friend and godmother of my child, Rachel, that when I die, she may open the box. I never thought it would be opened before I was gone.
Lucky you—the box is open. I’m going to extensively quote from those journals. I’ve kept meticulous records, all too aware that those pages were the only place I could share the unfiltered truth.
I recently showed my daughter the diary I wrote when I was thirteen, and she said, “You were fucked up.” I mean, my mom was in an abusive relationship when I was little. I gave my first blow job at thirteen. I was madly in love with Johnny Depp at fifteen. I was plagued by disordered eating and self-loathing from my teens on. It’s all in there. All the way up to me having cancer.
I’m finally free to reveal the true me, and in doing so, I hope in some small way you might be able to come to terms with some of your past, too. Just because life has sometimes been tough—and maybe at certain points it even felt impossible—that doesn’t mean we have to wallow in the darkness or be stymied by our histories. I’m here to tell you that despite how dark it gets, there’s a lot to gain from mining one’s past for meaning.
One of the things I’ve begun to see more clearly through my newfound freedom is that I’m a survivor. Given everything, I really shouldn’t still be here. But underneath all that Susan Applebee (what a woman in Santa Monica once insisted my name was) BS was a radically honest, genuine person who formed real connections, lifelong connections. I’m a good fucking friend, and this world needs more good friends. I survived it all thanks to an abiding passion to overcome, and an unwavering belief in myself, a belief that whatever the world threw at me—and man, it threw a lot, and it’s still throwing—I had to get to the other side of something. I want you to know that the other side is worth the fight. That you are always worth fighting for, and that you are never alone in your fight.
This book is a witness to that survival, and all the things I endured that I never told anyone because it was all too heartbreaking: the good stuff, the terrible stuff, the hilarious stuff, the shitty sad stuff. I have a degenerative disease that has probably ended my performing career, and without that, what is there to hide? And I truly believe that living in truth will liberate all of us: you, me, everyone.
I’ve packed a lot into these fifty-something years. For a long time, it felt impossible to find the meaning in everything I’ve been through, but I have come to understand that we ultimately get to choose what defines us—and the working through of that will be what drives the narrative of this book. I will detail what that pain has taught me, and in turn, what it has allowed me to release. I want readers to understand what each of us facing our pain can learn from getting on and getting through.
Many of the revelations about my childhood and much of my life will shock a lot of people. It’s scary—not going to lie—to finally decide to tell it all. Some days, when I open up the box in my closet and turn the pages of the many diaries I keep locked in there, I want to shut it all away as quickly as I opened it. My journals are a contemporary record of a girl becoming a woman and having to fight for every scrap of love she received, and sometimes it’s just too much to read back across those years. I want to save the six-year-old me, the eleven-year-old, the nineteen-year-old, the thirty-two-year-old… But I guess I already saved her, a little bit, at least, because here she is, sharing her most intimate moments from forty years of journaling, all in the hope of showing you that you don’t have to feel alone—you too can find your way, you too can survive. Hell, you too can flourish as I once did, before MS forced me into this prison of a bed.
In my ongoing effort to survive, it’s imperative for me to share my life with you. I hope in doing so that you can know you’re not alone, that someone else has had to survive, and has done so while making people laugh.
There is always light, always, and the deeper I dig into my past, the more good I’m unearthing, the more positives I have uncovered, things I can hold on to on the hardest days. I’ll tell a ton of stories about Married… with Children, about Anchorman, about Sweet Charity, about Dead to Me, and about the incredible people who’ve been in my life, from my mother to my daughter and so many in between.
There will be happy chapters about my wonderful friends and life, about my daughter’s amazing father and my husband (our love story spans a couple of lifetimes). Sadie, my brilliant daughter, will be a constant character, too, wandering in and out of the book. There will even be an account of my trawlerman boyfriend who is long gone but who now literally haunts my house, and there will be writing about my illnesses: my breast cancer and my MS. I’ll show how my mother got past her addictions. I’ll talk about my faith, and I’ll talk about (and probably to) God, and about karma, and all the things in between, all the things that I’ve learned that have made me a survivor, things I want to share with readers to perhaps help them survive, too. Because everybody has something, and everyone needs to be seen, this book is my way of seeing, of sharing the details of my life so that others can move forward in theirs.
