LOS ANGELES — Christina Applegate is where she spent many listless, painful nights over the last year working on her memoir: in bed. She passes most of her days inside a bedroom of her Laurel Canyon home. And it's already not a great day when we connect over video conference in late February — no day is free from the exhaustion and symptoms of multiple sclerosis, the autoimmune disease she was diagnosed with in 2021. This particular afternoon, she says, is "crap on a cracker."

"I'm sick as a big ol' dog," she explains. She raises up a heating pad — nicknamed Jake Ryan after the brooding heartthrob in "Sixteen Candles" — that's been warming her body.

"He dies a lot," she says. "And then we have to get a new Jake Ryan. He's actually on my abdomen right now and making me happy. I love Jake Ryan. He's really my bestie."

He may provide near-constant heat therapy, but readers of "You with the Sad Eyes," she says, may take on the role of therapists. For the nearly 300-page memoir, the 54-year-old actor broke open her personal journals, which she has kept since she was 13, and in turn, the vault that is her personal history to share her story. And it was not an easy story to tell. Yes, it's brushed with the unbridled humor and candor that fans of the Emmy-winning actor with a résumé that includes "Married ... With Children" and "Dead to Me" have come to expect. But it finds the star unpacking dark chapters — an absent father, a chaotic home life, sexual abuse she experienced as a child, body image struggles, an abusive boyfriend — before reaching her life-altering MS diagnosis.

"This book is not cathartic for me — let's just go there," Applegate says. "I just needed to dump this s— out somewhere. It's almost like you guys are now my therapists in the world. Also, I feel like so many people have gone through this [stuff], obviously — I didn't write this book for that. But let's f— come together, man, as kids of abuse, molestation — all these things — and really see each other and not feel so f— alone. But I didn't write this for that. I wrote it because someone said, 'Do you want to write a book?' I said, 'Well, if I'm going to write a book, it's going to have to start from Day 1.' And Day 1 ain't pretty. ... There's going to be really f— horrible s— and then we're going to have fun stuff — because that's what my editor told me to have (that's a joke!) — and crap again. That's my life."

The fun stuff? The book sprinkles some dishy and amusing moments amid the emotional heft — whether she's reflecting on her crush on Johnny Depp, who was eight years her senior, or the time she ditched Brad Pitt, her date at the 1989 MTV Video Music Awards, for rocker Sebastian Bach. There are glimmers of light too — namely her daughter Sadie with husband Martyn LeNoble.

But trauma was a part of Applegate's story early on. She grew up in L.A.'s storied bohemian enclave and music mecca Laurel Canyon — her father, Bob, was a music promoter turned producer, while her mother, Nancy, was a singer and actor. It was an upbringing marred by instability, pain and trauma. Her father abandoned the family when she was a baby; her mother, whom Applegate writes about with empathy and tenderness, struggled with drug and alcohol abuse and the long-term effects of an abusive relationship — "He was the worst man imaginable" she writes in the book of her "step-father" from ages 3 to 7. "The safety supplied by my beautiful mother was critically challenged by the presence of this man who moved into our lives and brought with him a universe of hurt and danger." The absence of a support system during this time meant Applegate was sometimes left in questionable care. In a chapter titled "LaLa Land," she reveals that, at age 5, a female "caregiver" forced Applegate to perform oral sex on her.

"I love my dad. He was peripheral. He was wonderful. He passed away last year and I really don't want to talk about him," Applegate says under the glow of her screen. "But I didn't have parents. I had a mom and she was it. Through all her stuff, she was right there. I love that lady. She's 84 now and my heart's starting to break."

Her eyes show it.

That's the powerful through line in the book, the recurring reference to its Cyndi Lauper-inspired title — the sadness in Applegate's eyes. She notes it at various moments to emphasize the accumulation of emotional weight, including the grief of being stuck in a physically and emotionally abusive relationship during the height of "Married... With Children." She'd untangle the inner turmoil in her journal entries in ways that, at times, feel foreboding: "Maybe it's just the long hours I have been spending on my bed thinking about my illness, but in reading these words from more than three decades ago, I find that I suffer a kind of concussive awareness of the future impact of all these dark events from my early life," she writes in the book.

Just as the painful moments of her life took shape at an early age, so too did a refuge from it. She's been acting since infancy, making her on-screen debut at 3 months old in 1972, playing a baby boy alongside her mother in an episode of "Days of Our Lives"; by kindergarten, Applegate became a member of the Screen Actors Guild. The fictional worlds she got lost in would become an instrumental escape from her reality at various points in her life.

"You pull up your big-girl panties and you do what you got to do," Applegate says. "You get up at 6 or 5 or 9, or whatever it is, and you get down there and you focus and you're a team player. Whatever is happening at home, you don't bring it there."

Her career really began to flourish by the late 1980s and early '90s when, despite having an aversion to comedy and initially turning down the role, she starred as Kelly Bundy in "Married... With Children," the boundary-pushing sitcom that was critical to establishing nascent Fox's identity. After playing the ultra-cool and shallow character for 11 seasons, she went on to other starring roles in films ("Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead," as well as the "Anchorman" and "Bad Moms" movies) and television ("Jesse," "Samantha Who?," "Up All Night" and "Dead to Me"), and was nominated for a Tony for the 2005 Broadway revival of "Sweet Charity." It all led to Applegate, in 2022, receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a goal she was chasing since 1977, when she spotted scores of them on a drive to then-Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood to watch "Star Wars" with her mom as a child. She hasn't acted since wrapping Netflix's "Dead to Me" in 2022 — it was during production on the show's third and final season that she received her diagnosis and began treatment.

But more than acting, she says, dance was a vital part of her identity. For most of her adult life, she's had a dance studio in her house. She'll still dance here and there, as much as her body allows. But mostly she'll watch Bob Fosse dance on a loop while curled up in bed.

Does she dream about dancing?

"Yvonne, are you trying to f— me up?" she deadpans. "You're making me cry about stuff. Of course I miss dance. It's something Sadie and I would do together, like, five years ago and now I can't. It's gone."

Applegate talks about living with MS — whether in interviews, in the book or on the podcast "MeSsy," which she co-hosts with Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who also lives with the disease — with more bluntness than how she approached discussing her journey with breast cancer, which she was diagnosed with in 2008 at age 36. There's no sugarcoating. No platitudes about blessings. Just the truth. For her, it's just one piece of a larger effort to get people to connect honestly.

"I just feel like, when I'm talking about this, the way that I do talk about it," she says. "Our listeners from the 'MeSsy' podcast go, 'Thank you, Christina, this does f— suck!' Let's just vent to each other. Because I was full of s— on 'Oprah,' I was full of s— on 'GMA' [Good Morning America] when I had breast cancer. I was trying to keep myself up by saying those things. I realized I was not helping anyone. Or maybe it was. If I inspired you in some way, fantastic, please take it. But I wasn't inspiring myself. I was sad and I was full of s—. We need a community. We need a bunch of us talking to each other — caretakers and children of people with MS and all this stuff. I just want to have a kumbaya with everybody right now because there's so much sadness with this disease."

But she doesn't want to delve too deeply about her experience with it at this juncture, she says — a publicist chimes in to mention Applegate will be launching a new online platform, Next in MS, where others can detail their own experience living with the disease; she'll share more about her journey and what she's learned then.

Wearing glasses and her hair pulled back in a top-knot, and backed by a tall headboard, Applegate grows more enthusiastic when the conversation turns to a lighter topic: reality TV. It was her other constant companion while working on the book. "The Traitors," "Real Housewives," "Below Deck" — "anything on Bravo," she says. "That's all I need." When I say I am a couple of episodes behind on "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills," she interjects: "Oh my God, that Amanda — I can't. No, no, no, no, no."

"You know," she considers for a brief moment before continuing, "I'm gonna say it and he's probably not going to be happy, but I'm texting with Jason. Captain Jason [of "Below Deck Down Under"], of course. We're just friends."

She says after work wrapped on the book — a two-and-a-half-year process — she slept. But the challenging days returned when it was time to record the audio version.

"That was the most hurtful thing — I don't even know if that's the word," she says. "Sitting down and just reading it out loud and reliving it. It's a really hard experience. Look, people are going to be like, 'Oh, you f— celebrity.' No. Reading your s— again. I did not like that. I wanted it to go away so quickly. So, I read it really fast. They kept saying, 'Can you not read it so fast?' And I'd be like, 'I need to go back to bed because I'm pissed off at this person and I'm pissed off at this person. That's how it felt."

It eventually leads to reflection on the idea of "happiness."

"If someone asked me if I've ever been happy, I would say 'no,'" she says. "I'm sorry. And I know that's a big statement to have. There's a part of the book that I talk about being in Big Sur and going, 'I feel happy.' I don't think I felt that way again — but that's a big thing we all have to talk about. Let's talk about that f— feeling. 'What is happy?' And, no, I have not been happy since that moment, except for the birth of my child, and every time she kisses me on my forehead and my nose and my cheeks or she hugs me and she says, 'I love you, mama' and she goes, 'Let's go listen to the Cure,' 'Let's go dance,' 'Let's go be weird.' Those are my happy moments. She is my lifetime."

She says she allowed her daughter to read through some of her old journals. But Sadie hasn't read the book — though Applegate has signed a copy for her — "She's like, 'Oh, mom, thank you so much.' And then she threw it across the room; not in an effigy, just in a ... she's dealing with school."

"Without outing my child, because I don't want to speak for all her feelings because that's not fair," she says, "She's lost her mom. I'm not dead. But I'm not the person that I was five years ago when I was dancing with her and hiking with her and playing tennis with her and doing things. She's lost her mom. And it's f— hard on her, man. And it's hard for her to talk about it as well. That's as far as I'm going to talk about it."

With our 37-minute session coming to an end, she perks up, thinking she hears her daughter, 15, arriving home from school. False alarm. I say I thought one of her body parts, which she has given unique nicknames like Meghan Markle (right leg) and Tootie from "The Facts of Life" (left leg) to scold when they're acting up, was giving her a hard time.

"Meghan has been so sweet to Tootie because Tootie is an a— today," she assures me. "I can't even walk into the bathroom with Tootie. But Meghan, I'm like, 'Girl, you got this.'"

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'YOU WITH THE SAD EYES'

By Christina Applegate

Little Brown: 304 pages, $32

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