Christina Applegate says teen daughter is 'my dedication to life' amid MS struggles

Erin Jensen, USA TODAYTue, March 3, 2026 at 11:01 AM UTC

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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.”

Christina Applegate receives her star on Los Angeles' Hollywood Walk of Fame on Nov. 14, 2022.

“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.

“It was not cathartic. It was explosive,” she adds. “I feel very raw.”

Applegate’s revelations are personal and unedited, she says.

She recalls knowing on her wedding day to actor Johnathon Schaech that he wasn’t the man for her. "I never considered stopping the wedding − for a start, I was halfway down the aisle," she explains in her book. "I kept thinking, Don’t be that guy... You’re sabotaging." They were married for four years before he filed for divorce.

She remembers battling anorexia while filming "Married… with Children.” "I had a vision of the specific clothes I wanted (Kelly) to wear, and to wear those clothes, I had to lean even deeper into my eating disorder," Applegate writes. "The anorexia was terrible. I wanted my bones to be sticking out. If I did eat something, I’d punish myself. Sometimes I wouldn’t eat for a whole day."

She writes of being sexually assaulted at 5 years old − when her story "darkens almost to black and though I wish I could draw a veil across these pages, I also owe a debt of witness to that little girl." When she was older, Applegate had a boyfriend so abusive she worried he would kill her. In 1991, as a young actress, she ended a pregnancy, which inspired her to write a heartbreaking poem: "But Mommy can’t be with you right now, but know she loves you more than any other miracle. And know that when it’s your time it will be your time."

“I'm really scared,” Applegate says. “Because I'm going to get some judgment about certain decisions I made, some very personal ones.”

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For the book, Applegate recorded herself talking for 100 hours over a year, she says.

“It was like having a therapy session, and I couldn't stop,” she says. “I didn't judge myself and I didn't want to judge myself and I didn't want to edit myself either. I wanted it to be everything that was coming out of my brain to my face hole, and that was it. I was like, ‘OK, I'm going to be free of this now. I want be free of it. I want be free of all this s--- that has been stuck inside of my soul, inside of my ball of trauma. I want to let it go.

“I'll never let it go,” Applegate realizes. “You never do, but… It is, ‘Let me be your friend, guys. Because I've got you. If you went through this abuse, if you went through this s---, I've got you. I hear you.’”

Christina Applegate says daughter Sadie is 'my dedication to life' amid MS battle

The approximately 3 million people living with multiple sclerosis (MS) around the world may also see themselves in Applegate’s experience. She received her diagnosis in 2021 while filming the final season of Netflix’s dark comedy “Dead to Me.”

“My knees feel like I have bricks attached to them, heavy and painful,” Applegate writes of her symptoms of the disease in which the immune system attacks the central nervous system. “My skin feels like it’s got third-degree, fourth-degree, fifth-degree burns. Something is constantly stabbing at my ankles. When I put my feet down on the ground when I wake up, it feels as if the floor is made of needles, yet I can’t feel them because my feet are completely numb. Somehow it manages to be both things at once.”

Applegate’s swift decline came over a matter of months, she says.

“I was hiking and running and playing tennis in January 2021. By June of 2021, I couldn't walk anymore, man,” she says. “My daughter (Sadie, whom she shares with husband Martyn LeNoble) saw a parent that she loved dancing with and playing tennis with and hiking with, and doing all this stuff. And now she just sees this person in a bed, and it depresses her beyond anything. And she's 15 f------ years old, man.”

Christina Applegate and daughter Sadie at the Screen Actors Guild Awards on Feb. 26, 2023 in Los Angeles.

So Applegate and her daughter make the most of the moments they’re still able to share together, like morning drives with The Beatles, The Cure, or Marcy Playground blasting.

“When she gets home from school or whatever, we hang out and we talk and we laugh, and it's the best,” Applegate says. “She's my dedication to life, man.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Christina Applegate reveals anorexia, abortion and struggles with MS

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