Too Many Emotions Filled My Soul - Christina Applegate Reflects on Abortion at 19 in New Memoir
Christina Applegate is revisiting one of the most painful periods of her life, and she is doing it in her own words.
In her debut memoir, You With the Sad Eyes, published March 3, the 54-year-old actress writes candidly about becoming pregnant at 19 and choosing to have an abortion in 1991.
She leans heavily on diary entries she kept at the time, allowing her younger voice to tell the story.
“In late April 1991, I fell pregnant. I want to turn away from what happened, but it’s all recorded in my diary,” she writes. “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.”
At the time, Applegate was in a relationship she now describes as abusive. The boyfriend is not named in the book. In her journals, she described feeling overwhelmed.
“Too many emotions are filling my soul,” she wrote then. She added that she had long believed if she became pregnant at the wrong time, she would not hesitate to have an abortion, even while acknowledging the complicated feelings she was experiencing.
As her diary reveals, the relationship itself was already unraveling. “I don’t really understand my relationship anymore. It isn’t good,” she wrote.
“Sometimes I don’t think it’s worth it.” Soon after learning she was pregnant, she said events took what she called “a brutal turn,” and she made the decision to end the pregnancy. At the time, she was starring as Kelly Bundy on the hit sitcom Married… With Children, and she wrote candidly about feeling that motherhood was not something she could take on then.
In one entry before the procedure, she expressed anger, fear, and confusion in raw language.
In another, written after the abortion on June 13, 1991, she described feeling physically unsteady but emotionally detached. “I feel pretty OK. Just kind of woozy. That gives me no time to realize what I have done,” she wrote. “Which is most likely the best right now.”
The memoir also details the volatility of the relationship she was in at the time. Applegate recounts incidents of alleged physical aggression, including a confrontation during a Christmas visit to her grandmother’s home in Indiana that prompted her family to call the police. She did not press charges.
Despite the intervention, she writes that she returned to the relationship. In another incident, she describes an argument in a motel room that escalated into violence, recalling the fear she felt in that moment.
Throughout the book, Applegate reflects on how difficult it was to leave the relationship for good, even when she recognized the harm. Her tone is direct and unflinching, but also compassionate toward her younger self.
Comments
Post a Comment