Since spotting the brass and terrazzo stars of the Hollywood Walk of Fame constellation at 5 years old, Christina Applegate knew she wanted one of her own, a way for her memory to remain long after she'd gone.
She first grasped stardom in 1975 when she became a card-carrying member of SAG-AFTRA for a series of Kmart radio spots. But as her career rocketed from TV show guest appearances to starring as the birdbrained bombshell Kelly Bundy on Fox’s “Married… with Children,” and films like “The Sweetest Thing” and “Anchorman,” the name she’d been making for herself felt less like her identity and more like another role.
“Christina Applegate is a character, a person who was beholden to people and production companies and everything and everyone else in this town,” she writes in her memoir, “You with the Sad Eyes,” out now. “She was someone I never was. When I hear that name, I catch my breath, and yet I also don’t want the world to fully know who I am either. I suppose this book is a small step to showing you all who I really am. Actually, a big step.”
“I've been waiting to put this s--- on paper for 40 years,” she tells USA TODAY in late February from her bed, where she’s “sick as a dog” from a viral infection. But Applegate, 54, didn’t anticipate how difficult it would be unearthing “all of these things that were so unbelievably horrifying in my life,” which she’s stuffed “into what I call my trauma ball in my stomach.” She excerpts from journals she started at 13 which were “supposed to go into a fire and die with me,” she says.
