Criticizing someone dealing with a devastating illness can feel harsh, even unkind.
However, being ill doesn’t grant a person the freedom to behave poorly, as Christina Applegate sometimes does in her new memoir, “You with the Sad Eyes.”
At 54, Applegate was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2021, following a double mastectomy after a breast cancer diagnosis in 2008.
In her book, she admits to deceiving Oprah Winfrey, ABC’s Robin Roberts, and American audiences by claiming her cancer was ‘a blessing.’
“It was bulls***,” Applegate reveals. “I was creating an ideal that no one dealing with cancer could realistically achieve, and for what purpose? To prove I had somehow triumphed through sheer determination?”
Applegate explains her decision to candidly share the toll MS has taken on her body, mind, and emotions. Yet, she seems unaware or indifferent to the fact that her honesty might not consider those who find positivity in their own battles.
Upon seeing her cancer-stricken friend Clea’s Instagram post, in which she wrote, ‘I’m strong; I’ve got this,’ Applegate went scorched earth.
It can seem unkind, churlish even, to criticize someone battling a catastrophic illness. But being sick doesn’t give one license to be terrible, as Christina Applegate often is in her new memoir.
She writes of calling her friend ‘the second I saw her post,’ and reaming her out:
‘”Nope, we’re not doing this today,” I said. “Do you actually feel strong? Do you actually feel empowered? Do you want to be a poster child for this disease?” I knew the answer was no. ‘Take it down. We’re going to rework this and I’m going to help you. And every post that you do from here on out is going to be like this: “Chemo f***ing sucked. All my hair is gone.”‘
Wow. That’s some ‘friend’. Applegate, by the way, never underwent chemotherapy for her cancer — so how would she know?
Elsewhere in the book, Applegate writes viciously of her first marriage to the actor Johnathon Schaech.
Though she never names him, their relationship was covered by the tabloids and dissolved rather quietly. Both have since remarried, and her cruelty here seems gratuitous.
By Applegate’s account, Schaech never abused her (unlike the ex-boyfriend who consumes a good one-third of her book), or tried to hinder her career, or cheated on her.
No. He simply had poor taste in shoes. He wasn’t cool enough, Applegate implies, for her and her crowd — the likes of Johnny Depp and the scene at his infamous LA nightclub, The Viper Room (more on that in a bit).
After a couple of pages on refusing to serve alcohol at her wedding, Applegate shares her most uncharitable thoughts about Schaech.
‘The worst thing was the moment I walked around the corner and into the ceremony… when I looked hard at the face of my husband-to-be, I thought, “Oh f***. F***, oh f***.”‘
Applegate writes too of ignoring the ‘red flag’ Schaech waved on their first date.
‘He had shown up in his boots, but not even cowboy boots,’ she writes. ‘I think they were supposed to look like a cowboy boot, but they missed the mark by a wide margin. No one should wear such things, but especially not if you live in Los Angeles… I remember thinking: Those shoes are so bad. Bad shoes, bad shoes, bad shoes, bad.’
It’s all so shallow. Truly, it makes her humblebrag about dumping Brad Pitt — mid-date at the 1989 VMAs to go off with Skid Row frontman Sebastian Bach — look positively quaint.
She writes of an abortion she had before Schaech, in April 1991, reprinting her heartless diary entry here:
‘I’m f***ing pregnant and I’m killing my child on Thursday. I’m thinking where the f*** can I go to recuperate from murder. 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 f***ing world.’
Her self-regard is enormous, even as she writes of her ostensible low self-esteem.
It’s all so shallow. Truly, it makes her humblebrag about dumping Brad Pitt (pictured in 1989) look positively quaint
It’s also quite curious that Applegate devotes pages to her time as a quote-unquote ‘member’ of the in-crowd at Johnny Depp’s Viper Room but does not mention that she was there the night actor River Phoenix overdosed and died — Halloween, 1993, a defining generational loss.
Perhaps due to journalist Martha Frankel’s unflattering January 1994 piece for Spin magazine, in which she claimed Applegate had been mocking Phoenix’s convulsions that night.
‘Christina Applegate, who had been inside the club, came out [to the sidewalk] and nervously watched Phoenix shaking,’ Frankel alleged. ‘When she went to report what was going on to one of her girlfriends, someone said that they were laughing and making fun of Phoenix’s soon-to-be-fatal condition. But Applegate says she was genuinely upset, and that the stories about her laughing are simply untrue.’
Surely her memoir would have been the perfect place to set that story straight.
Whatever the case, Applegate acquits herself dreadfully here. Not even her 14-year-old daughter, Sadie, is allowed her privacy.
‘We got into a big thing the other day,’ Applegate said on Kelly Ripa’s Let’s Talk Off-Camera podcast last year.
‘And sorry, Sadie, it has to be said — she said, “I miss who you were before you got sick.”‘
Did that, truly, need to be said? Did any of it?
