{"id":632498,"date":"2026-03-04T21:41:22","date_gmt":"2026-03-04T21:41:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/632498\/"},"modified":"2026-03-04T21:41:22","modified_gmt":"2026-03-04T21:41:22","slug":"i-remember-kelly-bundy-i-didnt-know-christina-applegate-her-new-memoir-unpacks-it-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/632498\/","title":{"rendered":"I remember Kelly Bundy. I didn\u2019t know Christina Applegate. Her new memoir unpacks it all."},"content":{"rendered":"

Christina Applegate was a \u201990s icon in my world. She was the cool\/beautiful girl who played Kelly Bundy on Married… With Children. She starred in Don\u2019t Tell Mom the Babysitter\u2019s Dead. She had a list of famous boyfriends.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve watched nearly every show she headlined \u2014 Jesse, Samantha Who?, Up All Night, Dead to Me \u2014 and her big-screen comedies, from The Sweetest Thing to Anchorman. Through work, I followed the public chapters: divorce, motherhood, remarriage, breast cancer and, since 2021, multiple sclerosis<\/a> (MS).<\/p>\n

That familiarity gave me the mistaken impression that I somehow knew her story. Then I opened her memoir, You With the Sad Eyes<\/a>, out now.<\/p>\n

Applegate has lived a far more layered \u2014 and painful \u2014 life than the headlines suggested. She writes about childhood trauma, sexual abuse, body dysmorphia, relationship abuse, illness and survival, all threaded through fame.<\/p>\n

The book doesn\u2019t tie itself up with easy lessons. The 54-year-old actress, whose diaries appear throughout, writes that she \u201cwill probably go away\u201d because of MS, a chronic neurological disease in which the immune system mistakenly attacks healthy cells.<\/p>\n

The heavy stuff<\/strong><\/p>\n

Living with MS \u201csucks,\u201d Applegate writes. \u201cEvery little stinking part of it sucks.\u201d The disease has \u201crobbed me of who I am,\u201d and \u201cforced me into this prison of a bed.\u201d Her daily pain level often sits at an 8 out of 10. Steroid treatment initially caused her significant weight gain<\/a>. Stomach complications later led to dramatic weight loss and repeated hospital visits. She hasn\u2019t worked since Dead to Me \u2014 what she calls the \u201crole of a lifetime\u201d \u2014 and isn\u2019t sure she will again.<\/p>\n

Try not to cry when the MeSsy podcast<\/a> host writes that her 15-year-old daughter Sadie\u2019s \u201cheart is broken at what has become of me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Applegate<\/p>\n

Applegate and her daughter, Sadie, at the 2023 Screen Actors Guild Awards.<\/p>\n

(Myung J. Chun via Getty Images)<\/p>\n

Before she contracted MS, Applegate suffered breast cancer and a double mastectomy in 2008. Applegate admits she \u201cdidn’t look in the mirror for a year<\/a>.\u201d When she first held Sadie skin to skin as a newborn, she noticed a nurse crying as she looked at her scarred chest \u2014 a moment that underscores how complicated her relationship with her body has been.<\/p>\n

That all began long before her illnesses. Applegate, who grew up in L.A.\u2019s Laurel Canyon, was sexually abused<\/a> by a babysitter at 5. It left her, she said, \u201cnever fully comfortable\u201d in her body or being touched.<\/p>\n

Applegate grew up in what she describes as an \u201cabusive and scary\u201d home after her father left when she was a baby. Her mother, singer Nancy Priddy, struggled with heroin addiction and domestic abuse. Applegate witnessed both the violence and adults using drugs around her.<\/p>\n

As a teen, Applegate was encouraged to diet, with her mom suggesting she get liposuction. It led to a lifetime struggle with body dysmorphia. While playing Kelly Bundy, a character built around being ogled, she was starving herself<\/a>, exercising for hours and sometimes not eating all day. A size 0, she still hated her body and didn\u2019t think she was pretty.<\/p>\n

Applegate does not blame Married\u2026 With Children, noting that she chose to lean into the bombshell image. But it was all-consuming.<\/p>\n

\u201cSure, it was always part of the show that I would be an object for men to leer at, but I was the one who wanted to wear those Kelly Bundy dresses to represent something in the zeitgeist,\u201d she writes. \u201cMy sickness for perfection was always the driving force in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Al<\/p>\n

Applegate on the set of Married… With Children, with her TV dad, Ed O’Neill, and David Faustino, who played her brother.<\/p>\n

(\u00a920thCentFox\/Courtesy Everett Collection)<\/p>\n

Sometimes it still is. \u201cI have never known how to deal with the fact that I am a successful person yet I hate myself,\u201d she writes.<\/p>\n

Even in adulthood, trauma followed her. She details one abusive relationship<\/a> in which she feared for her life, describing one night when her boyfriend came at her with a shard of glass. Another time, he poured a bottle of alcohol down her throat. She writes about how long it took to walk away. She also shared that she had an abortion<\/a> while they were together.<\/p>\n

She also recounts events she cannot fully remember, like a blackout \u2014 or blocked memory \u2014 while she was with the late TV producer Kim Manners. She woke up with \u201cmarks all over my butt\u201d and knew \u201csomething bad had happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

The memoir’s title comes from her mother telling her she was born a \u201csad little girl.\u201d Applegate wrote that she sees it differently: \u201cI was introduced to the weight of the world much too early in life.\u201d<\/p>\n

The lighter (but still revealing) stories<\/strong><\/p>\n

The book isn\u2019t without Hollywood stories \u2014 although they feel like a side plot.<\/p>\n

She was friends with Brad Pitt before he was \u201cBrad Pitt!\u201d and famously ditched him<\/a> at the 1989 MTV Video Musical Awards for Skid Row\u2019s Sebastian Bach. Pitt was left having to drive Applegate\u2019s mom home and, she said, was \u201csubsequently very mad at me\u201d \u2014 \u201cfor many years.\u201d (Her relationship with Bach was short-lived. She found out he had a 1-year-old child with his long-term partner.)<\/p>\n

\"Applegate<\/p>\n

Applegate writes about ditching Brad Pitt at the MTV VMAs for a rock star.<\/p>\n

(Barry King via Getty Images)<\/p>\n

Like the rest of the world at the time, Applegate was in love with Johnny Depp at 15. The difference: She was actually friends with him. She appeared on 21 Jump Street and hung out with him in Vancouver. In L.A., they were in the same circle, and she was a regular at his L.A. club, the Viper Room.<\/p>\n

Dance \u2014 once her biggest passion \u2014 led Applegate to become an original member of the Pussycat Dolls. For 10 years, they performed their burlesque troupe act weekly before Robin Antin turned the group into its pop incarnation.<\/p>\n

Applegate dated the singer Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who was nine years her senior, when she was 17. The first thing he ever said to her was: \u201cI want to go out with you.\u201d After he dumped her, he asked her to do his laundry. \u201cAnd like a stupid f***ing fan, I did it,\u201d she admits. She writes that she \u201cloved the assholes and f***ups.\u201d<\/p>\n

She married the actor Johnathon Schaech in 2001, even though she knew on their wedding day that she shouldn\u2019t. The signs were there<\/a>, she writes, recalling their first date and how she hated his terrible shoes.<\/p>\n

Her dark humor surfaces often. Applegate names all her body parts so she can give them hell as they give her trouble. One leg is \u201cMeghan Markle.\u201d<\/a> \u201cTootie\u201d (the Facts of Life character) is another body part. She calls her brain \u201cf****** asshole.\u201d Her heating pad \u201cis Jake Ryan,\u201d a nod to John Hughes\u2019s Sixteen Candles.<\/p>\n

Set war stories<\/strong><\/p>\n

While Applegate loved the Married\u2026 With Children cast, by the end, she was done with Kelly Bundy. She showed up for the final season having shaved her head \u2014 surprise! \u2014 and had to wear a wig. After the show \u2014 which she said could never be made today \u2014 had ended, she turned down Legally Blonde because she was done playing \u201cdumb blondes.\u201d That was a decision that, she as she jokes about it today, cost her \u201cReese Witherspoon money.\u201d<\/p>\n

Making Anchorman was a career highlight, but she was lowballed on her offer. When she initially turned down the part, her costar Will Ferrell and the director, Adam McKay ,offered to give her part of their paychecks to get her to say yes.<\/p>\n

\"Applegate,<\/p>\n

Applegate says Will Ferrell supplemented her Anchorman salary when the studio lowballed her.<\/p>\n

(Vince Bucci via Getty Images)<\/p>\n

Applegate said that when she made 2016\u2019s Bad Moms, the filmmakers spent $30,000 to digitally enhance her appearance to make her look younger. That fed her ongoing self-doubt.<\/p>\n

One of the best throwaway anecdotes is about the problems she ran into with her Surviving Christmas costar Ben Affleck, and his \u201cabnormally large head.” \u201cThey had to put me in a certain position for the posters, because his head was so much bigger than mine.\u201d (Somewhere right now, Affleck is making his meme face<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

What reading the memoir made me revisit<\/strong><\/p>\n

I read You With the Sad Eyes with my search window open \u2014 not necessarily for gossip, but for context. Things I looked up while I was reading:<\/p>\n

Is Applegate still married?<\/strong> Applegate writes about living with her daughter and navigating MS at home, so I found myself wondering about her marriage. The latter part of the book gets into her \u201ckismet love\u201d story with Dutch bassist Martyn LeNoble, of Porno for Pirates fame, but I initially wasn\u2019t sure they were still together. She ultimately gives a lot of insight into falling for \u201cthe dude who lost his teeth but doesn\u2019t even remember how he lost them,\u201d including how they met years before they got together, when LeNoble was going through personal struggles. They reconnected years later.<\/p>\n

\"Barefoot,<\/p>\n

Applegate, at her 2022 Hollywood Walk of Fame Star Ceremony, with her daughter, Sadie, her husband, Martyn LeNoble, her stepdaughter, Marlon, and her mom, Nancy Priddy.<\/p>\n

(VALERIE MACON via Getty Images)<\/p>\n

The Brad and Johnny years. <\/strong>Seeing the photos again \u2014 early Pitt<\/a>, Jump Street era Depp<\/a> \u2014 made me scour the internet for some of her old red carpet pix.<\/p>\n

Lee Grivas. <\/strong>Applegate writes about her ex dying of an overdose<\/a> in 2008, and how he haunts her house today (in a good way).<\/p>\n

Who was in the cast of <\/strong>Just Visiting? <\/strong>Applegate tells a story about someone being \u201ccruel\u201d to her on the film<\/a>‘s London set. One clue: It\u2019s not costar Jean Reno, who she says stuck up for her.<\/p>\n

Her Oprah Winfrey interview. <\/strong> After Applegate\u2019s breast cancer diagnosis, she appeared on Oprah in 2008. In the memoir, she calls the sitdown performative, noting that referring to her diagnosis as a \u201cblessing\u201d<\/a> didn\u2019t serve her or anyone else.<\/p>\n

Old clips. <\/strong>Applegate earned her SAG card at 7, but had started appearing in ads and on TV long before that. As an infant, she appeared on Days of Our Lives <\/a>with her mom.<\/p>\n

Her mother, Nancy Priddy. <\/strong>Reading about her mother\u2019s struggles sent me searching for her music<\/a> and backstory. She famously performed with Leonard Cohen and released her own album. She was in a relationship with Crosby, Stills and Nash\u2019s Stephen Stills, who Applegate still calls \u201cUncle Dadu.\u201d<\/p>\n