Unflinchingly honest and darkly funny, You with the Sad Eyes unveils a side of Christina Applegate we’ve never seen, forever cementing her formidable and iconoclastic legacy.
Christina Applegate came of age on sets and stages, expected to be on
time, with lines learned, ready for lights-camera-action. What started
as a financial necessity soon became an emotional escape from a
tumultuous home life in the infamous Laurel Canyon scene of the 70s and
80s. She rocketed to stardom on the sitcom Married...with Children and went on to captivate audiences in classics like Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitters Dead…, Anchorman, and Dead to Me in her five-decade long career.
Then it all stopped. A Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis in 2021 confined
her to a king-sized bed and the company of memories she’d rather forget:
memories of the self-doubt and body dysmorphia that stalked her
meteoric rise, of her mother’s fight against addiction and abuse after
her father left, and of the tax life had taken on her body and mind that
was suddenly coming due.
Now, at her most intimate and
vulnerable, she unveils a story not even those closest to her fully
know. She returns to the diaries she kept her whole life, finding the
pain matched by joy, the losses mitigated by the extraordinary, and the
weight of life lifted by her unrelenting belief that something greater
lay ahead. No longer willing to lock herself away and with the
perspective only our own mortality can bring, she knew it was imperative
to tell it all.
You with the Sad Eyes presents
a remarkable woman and her legacy. In her own words, “I truly believe
that books can make people feel less alone. That’s why I’m doing this. You with the Sad Eyes won’t
be some big violin scratching for my life. But it will be real. It will
be filled with the ups and downs, the humor and grief of life.
So here I am.
Real me.
Lots to say.”