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 be in serious movies. She writes of being known as thin, beautiful and desirable, while despising her body and doing everything she can to shrink it. The photos lied, then. They told stories that made everyone else feel better.
