Christina Applegate is opening up about her life, career and battle with MS thus far in her memoir, You With the Sad Eyes, published on Tuesday. One revelation from the memoir is that she had an abortion when she was 19 amid an abusive relationship
“In late April 1991, I fell pregnant,” she writes in her memoir per Entertainment Weekly. “I want to turn away from what happened, but it’s all recorded in my diary. There are moments in my life that are too painful to force into narrative or meaning, so I’ll let my voice from back then speak.”
Her memoir includes excerpts from old journals, one of which reportedly details the moment she learned she was 6 1/2 weeks pregnant at the time. “Two days before I found out, I got into a car accident on the way to the gynecologist. My car didn’t survive, but luckily, I did,” she wrote, as detailed by EW. “I knew I was pregnant. I couldn’t understand why even though I was watching my eating I still felt fat. I couldn’t understand why sex made me sick and I cried at the drop of a hat. Now I know. I always felt that if I ever got pregnant when I knew it was the wrong time, I wouldn’t have any problem having an abortion. ‘Oh, whatever, it isn’t even a baby yet.’ That’s bulls—, this creature is incredible. It makes me feel whole, safe…”
Of her boyfriend, Applegate writes of their emotionally abusive relationship: “My boyfriend said I was a disgusting, self-obsessed, eating-disordered fat pig today (not in so many words). That opened my eyes a great deal. … I don’t really understand my relationship anymore. It isn’t good. Sometimes I don’t think it’s worth it. … I feel I have lost myself somewhere, and I can’t find her for the life of me.”
“His family will hate me when they find out that I killed their family member because they don’t believe in it. But I can’t have this baby because I have work to do to entertain this fucking world. Besides, I can’t… now,” she writes of having an abortion.
In an entry dated June 13, 1991, Applegate reportedly writes, “it’s over.” Then she adds, “I feel pretty okay. Just kind of woozy. That gives me no time to realize what I have done. Which is most likely the best right now.”
She continues, “I was looking over what I’d written yesterday and just have to laugh. My emotions were extremely warped (I really don’t feel that way. Honestly, I think when you’re pregnant you tend to feel that way about the male figure in your life). My life is pretty wild. I could seriously write a book. I guess this kind of is.”
In addition to her early life and career, Applegate also writes about her MS diagnosis and the “excruciating agony” of the disease in her memoir. In 2021, Applegate publicly revealed that she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, described by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society as “an unpredictable, often disabling disease of the central nervous system that disrupts the flow of information within the brain, and between the brain and body.”
“I wish I could say that I am a miracle,” Applegate writes in her memoir per the NY Post. “Though most days it’s very hard to believe, and in any case, I don’t want to minimize what this disease does to a human body and soul.”
In her memoir, Applegate shares the struggles she has with simple movements: “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. My stomach frequently slows to a halt, leaving me to regularly rush to the emergency room in agony.”
When looking back at the first signs of MS, which she learned while filming the final season of Netflix’s Dead to Me, Applegate recalled asking her chiropractor why her toes were twitching: “I’ll never forget the look he gave me,” she writes. After numbness crept into her extremities, she was tested. Results from a brain scan showed 30 lesions across its surface and the MS diagnosis.
“I remember trying to get down the stairs of my house at six o’clock in the morning, and I could make it to only the ninth stair,” she recalls while filming at the time.
She also reveals that she’s had to wear adult diapers due to “incontinence issues” because of the illness.
Her current treatment plan consists of her getting steroid infusions every six months to slow the disease. However, the drugs have side effects, including wiping out her B cells, leaving her vulnerable to infection, and weight gain.
The weight gain made receiving her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame bittersweet, as Applegate writes, “Once people stared at my boobs; then they stared at my broken foot. But now I knew they were staring not only because I was disabled; they were staring because I was fat, forever an unacceptable fate for women in Hollywood.”
“I didn’t look in the mirror for a year,” Applegate, who has been open about her struggles with an eating disorder in the past, writes. She eventually dropped more than 50 pounds after being put on a liquid diet to manage her stomach issues.
Per the LA Times, Applegate also writes about her father leaving the family when she was a baby and her mother’s struggles with drug and alcohol abuse. She also reveals that at age 5, a female “caregiver” forced her to perform oral sex on her.
Overall, with her memoir, Applegate writes with bluntness and no sugarcoating. “This book is not cathartic for me — let’s just go there,” Applegate told The Los Angeles Times of her memoir. “I just needed to dump this shit out somewhere. It’s almost like you guys are now my therapists in the world.”
