Book of the Day

From the review

After a multiple sclerosis diagnosis in 2021, Christina Applegate spent long stretches in a king-sized bed with memories she would happily have left alone. You with the Sad Eyes is where those memories end up, alongside the diaries she kept for most of her life. She had worked since childhood, first because the family needed money and then because a set was a better place to be than home, and this memoir asks what that arrangement cost her. The argument, put plainly: the woman audiences knew from Married...with Children, Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, Anchorman and Dead to Me was a working professional long before she was a person anyone checked in on. The diaries are the evidence, and they're good evidence. Applegate quotes them often, and the entries from her adolescence give her Laurel Canyon childhood a texture that hindsight rarely produces, and they let the reader watch a kid work out a home life that was coming apart. The home she was escaping was unstable. Her mother fought addiction, and abuse is part of the record. Self-doubt and body dysmorphia then rode along with her rise. The sharpest idea in the book is the split between the famous Christina Applegate and Kiki, the name her close friends use. Much of the memoir is her working out how far apart those two people were, and which of them the audience was actually getting on screen.