Christina Applegate’s life story: horrible stuff, some fun, then awful again
American actress Christina Applegate opens up about abuse, trauma and living with multiple sclerosis as she releases her memoir
Christina Applegate is where she has spent many listless, painful nights over the last year working on her memoir: in bed.
She passes most of her days inside a bedroom of her home in Laurel Canyon, a neighbourhood of Los Angeles in the Hollywood Hills.
It is already not a great day when we connect over video conference in late February – no day is free from the exhaustion and symptoms of multiple sclerosis, the autoimmune disease she was diagnosed with in 2021. This particular afternoon, she says, is “c*** on a cracker”.
“I’m sick as a big ol’ dog,” she explains. She raises up a heating pad – nicknamed Jake Ryan after the brooding heartthrob in the 1984 romcom Sixteen Candles – that has been warming her body.
“He dies a lot,” she says. “And then we have to get a new Jake Ryan. He’s actually on my abdomen right now and making me happy. I love Jake Ryan. He’s really my bestie.”
He may provide near-constant heat therapy, but readers of You with the Sad Eyes, she says, may take on the role of therapists.
For the nearly 300-page memoir, the 54-year-old actor broke open her personal journals, which she has kept since she was 13, and in turn, the vault that is her personal history, to share her story.