All posts tagged: memoir

Christina Applegate Had an Abortion at 19, Memoir Reveals

Christina Applegate Had an Abortion at 19, Memoir Reveals

Published by Daniella Wilson

Christina Applegate is opening up about her life, career and battle with MS thus far in her memoir, You With the Sad Eyes, published on Tuesday. One revelation from the memoir is that she had an abortion when she was 19 amid an abusive relationship “In late April 1991, I fell pregnant,” she writes in her memoir per Entertainment Weekly. “I want to turn away from what happened, but it’s all recorded in my diary. There are moments in my life that are too painful to force into narrative or meaning, so I’ll let my voice from back then speak.” Her memoir includes excerpts from old journals, one of which reportedly details the moment she learned she was 6 1/2 weeks pregnant at the time. “Two days before I found out, I got into a car accident on the way to the gynecologist. My car didn’t survive, but luckily, I did,” she wrote, as detailed by EW. “I knew I was pregnant. I couldn’t understand why even though I was watching my eating I still …

Christina Applegate, You with the Sad Eyes review: The ‘Anchorman’ star has written the most devastating celebrity memoir of the year

Christina Applegate, You with the Sad Eyes review: The ‘Anchorman’ star has written the most devastating celebrity memoir of the year

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter While reading You with the Sad Eyes, the new memoir by the actor Christina Applegate, I kept thinking about old photographs. In Applegate’s life and in her career, there are repeated gulfs between the thoughts of things and the facts of things, and the cameras that capture them. She writes of an early photo she has of herself, her mother and her stepfather, and how everyone’s smiling despite her mother’s drug addiction and the abuse her stepfather inflicted upon them. She writes of the ribald sitcom Married… with Children, which made her a star and cast her as a prototypical dumb blonde who defined American sex appeal in the late Eighties. Those memories are punctuated by old diary entries that express her embarrassment about starring in it; she insists she’s actually a poet and a rock chick and is desperate to …

Christina Applegate on life with multiple sclerosis: ‘I won’t lie and say any of this is a blessing’ | Autobiography and memoir

Christina Applegate on life with multiple sclerosis: ‘I won’t lie and say any of this is a blessing’ | Autobiography and memoir

Published by Sam Flores

In 2021 I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. MS attacks your nervous system and slows down your functions – your respiratory system, your organs, everything. The disease eats away at all the things we take for granted. Some of us with MS have a raft of pain; some don’t. I have a lot of it. When I wake up, I often can’t get my arm to move far enough to grab the cup of water by my bed or my phone from its charger. I have infusions every six months to slow the disease’s progress, but those infusions kill all my B cells [a type of white blood cell that makes antibodies], making me prone to infection. My stomach frequently slows to a halt, leaving me to rush to the emergency room in agony. Most days, simply walking across the room feels like scaling a mountain. One of the worst side-effects of the illness is the exhaustion. It feels as though I’ve been on a three‑day sleepless bender – and that’s how I feel after …

Prince Edward’s ‘love letters’ behind new bombshell memoir written by ex-girlfriend | Royal | News

Prince Edward’s ‘love letters’ behind new bombshell memoir written by ex-girlfriend | Royal | News

Published by Sam Flores

A new royal book about Prince Edward and his five-year on-and-off relationship with West End star Ruthie Henshall is tipped to bring more angst among Palace staff and the wider Royal Family, according to reports. Henshall’s new book, The Showgirl and the Prince, will be published in July and promises to reveal “the bittersweet joy of first love” between the late Queen’s youngest son and the famous actress. Edward dated Hendall on and off between 1988 and 1993, just before he met then-Sophie Rhys-Jones, the now Duchess of Edinburgh. According to Hensall, the prince’s recently discovered love letters were what inspired her to write her memoir. She claims the book will document their romance from its secretive beginnings to visits to Buckingham Palace and to Windsor for tea with Queen Elizabeth II. According to The Telegraph, the release of the book is “likely to create angst amid courtiers and the wider Royal Family as it reels from the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor”. It is not known if the royals were given a preview of the …

Christina Applegate opens up about being molested as a child in new memoir

Christina Applegate opens up about being molested as a child in new memoir

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Christina Applegate is speaking publicly for the first time about surviving molestation in her debut memoir, You With the Sad Eyes. Out March 3, the book pulls back the curtain on the Married with Children star’s tumultuous life, from her abusive childhood to her life-altering multiple sclerosis diagnosis in 2021. In her memoir, Applegate, 54, recalls being molested at five years old by a female babysitter, which left her “never fully comfortable” with being touched as an adult. “I knew every part of it was wrong. I felt sick and scared and sad,” she wrote in an excerpt shared with People. The actor said that as a result, “I never fully felt comfortable being touched, and that’s true still. I’ve never felt comfortable with it my whole life, really, and all because of that girl forcing me to do something I …

Gisèle Pelicot’s Extraordinary Memoir – The Atlantic

Gisèle Pelicot’s Extraordinary Memoir – The Atlantic

Published by Sam Flores

One afternoon in 2024, when her session in court had ended unusually early, Gisèle Pelicot went to the Leclerc supermarket in Carpentras, a picturesque town in Provence. She asked to meet the security guard who, four years earlier, had confronted her husband, Dominique, after observing Dominique trying to use his phone to film up the skirts of unsuspecting female shoppers. The guard had been irate at the time. He had been thinking, he later told the Daily Mail, about his mother and sister, who shopped at that supermarket and might have been vulnerable to this creep with a cameraphone. Police officers who arrested Dominique Pelicot went to his home, seized his personal devices, and found more than 20,000 images and videos of Dominique—and of other men he had invited into his home—raping his drugged wife. Gisèle Pelicot wanted to thank the guard, who she believes saved her life. Prior to her husband’s arrest, her physical health had been deteriorating due to almost a decade of being drugged and violently assaulted. Had no one intervened, she …

Another World by Melvyn Bragg review – portrait of the broadcaster as a young man | Autobiography and memoir

Another World by Melvyn Bragg review – portrait of the broadcaster as a young man | Autobiography and memoir

Published by Sam Flores

It’s October 1958, and a nearly 19-year-old Melvyn Bragg is on the platform at Wigton railway station, saying goodbye to his childhood sweetheart, Sarah. He is off to read history at Wadham College, Oxford, one of the youngest in his cohort because national service is being phased out. Another World starts here, picking up the story left off in Back in the Day, Bragg’s previous memoir about his childhood and youth in this small Cumbrian town. Oxford to Bragg seems “more a theatre than a city, a spectacle rather than a habitation”. After his prelims, the weeding-out exams in his second term, he is left alone until his finals. He discovers Ingmar Bergman and has many earnest pub conversations about whether Pasternak will get the Nobel prize, or jazz is superior to rock’n’roll. He goes on the Aldermaston march and joins the anti-apartheid movement – although in hindsight he sees this as inspired by a residual faith in empire, with South Africa as Britain’s moral responsibility. Even after Suez, he owns a pencil sharpener in …

‘I don’t want to live in hatred’: Gisèle Pelicot publishes her memoir ‘A Hymn to Life’ – Perspective

‘I don’t want to live in hatred’: Gisèle Pelicot publishes her memoir ‘A Hymn to Life’ – Perspective

Published by Sam Flores

To display this content from YouTube, you must enable advertisement tracking and audience measurement. Accept Manage my choices One of your browser extensions seems to be blocking the video player from loading. To watch this content, you may need to disable it on this site. Try again PERSPECTIVE © FRANCE 24 Issued on: 17/02/2026 – 15:14Modified: 17/02/2026 – 15:17 10:06 min From the show Reading time 1 min On the day that her memoir is published, Gisèle Pelicot has again spoken of her desire to meet and talk with her ex-husband, who repeatedly drugged her and invited strangers over to their house to rape her. Pelicot’s book “A Hymn to Life” covers the full arc of her story, including the trial she went through. In Perspective, we spoke to one of the journalists who has covered her story throughout: Catherine Porter, who is Paris correspondent for The New York Times. She says she knew before she first went to court that the story would resonate across France, but that Pelicot’s decision to waive her anonymity …

A Hymn to Life by Gisèle Pelicot review – a unique memoir by a figure of astonishing power | Books

A Hymn to Life by Gisèle Pelicot review – a unique memoir by a figure of astonishing power | Books

Published by Sam Flores

It is a mark of the power and honesty of Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir, A Hymn to Life – a seemingly impossible writing project in which the author must reconcile herself with horrors of which she has no recollection – that in the first 40 pages, the person I felt most angry towards was Pelicot herself. Her ex-husband, Dominique, who will almost certainly be in jail for the rest of his life for drugging and raping his wife and recruiting 50 men over the internet to do likewise, takes his place among the monsters of our age. In his absence, the reader may experience a version of what happened in Gisèle Pelicot’s own family – namely, the misdirection of anger towards her. I have read enough books by female survivors of male sexual violence to say with confidence that Hymn to Life is unique. Pelicot – she decided to keep her married name in the interests of giving those of her grandchildren who share it a way to be proud rather than ashamed – was 67 …

Darryl Pinckney on Memoir, Friendship, and Elizabeth Hardwick | Darryl Pinckney, Jarrett Earnest

Darryl Pinckney on Memoir, Friendship, and Elizabeth Hardwick | Darryl Pinckney, Jarrett Earnest

Published by José Betancourt

In the first episode of our podcast Private Life, Darryl Pinckney talks with host Jarrett Earnest about his close friend and former teacher Elizabeth Hardwick. Pinckney discusses her inimitable voice on the page, her love of literature’s most “terrific losers,” and the people in her inner circle, including the Review’s editor Barbara Epstein, Mary McCarthy, and Susan Sontag, who came to shape Hardwick’s life and art. Pinckney reflects on the painful process of writing memoirs and his education in early 1970s New York City. Click the “Subscribe” link in the player above to follow this podcast on your favorite listening platform. Darryl Pinckney is the author of two novels as well as the memoir Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan (2022). He met Hardwick while a student in her creative writing seminar at Columbia University, then worked as an assistant at The New York Review of Books before contributing his first article, in 1977, “The Black Upper Class,” a review of Stephen Birmingham’s Certain People: America’s Black Elite. For the …