When Barbara and Stanley and Meghan and Tootie and Gail and Olivia and Calliope and Stacey are doing weird things, I try to talk to them, and because I have a disease of the nervous system, it’s almost like they listen. When I was first diagnosed, Barbara would shake constantly, and one of my friends, Carolyn, would yell, “Barbara! Be quiet!” Sometimes it would help.
My brain has a name, too: Stuart, aka Fucking Asshole.
This disease has robbed me of who I am, has robbed me of my life, of the things I loved. I was invincible. I loved running. I loved Peloton, I played tennis, and I loved—I mean really loved—to dance.
I want to pick up the guitar over there by the wall, but my hands cramp. I used to love saying to Sadie, my amazing daughter, “Yes, of course I’ll take you wherever you want to go in the car.” Now, I often can’t drive her anywhere.
But I like to watch TV—the worse the better, usually reality shows likeReal Housewives—because with TV I get to escape. I don’t have to think. I don’t want narratives, art, series in which you invest in some antihero across seven brilliant seasons. I want rich women screaming at each other.
I keep the TV on twenty-four hours a day because without it the quiet is so loud in my head I can’t bear it.
Would I have wanted it this way, to have everything stripped away? Did I envision finally arriving at a place of raw honesty about my life, and that would be agoodthing? Fuck no. I want to work and dance and take Sadie everywhere, but being forced into this home-based life has stripped away my last vestiges of reserve. It has afforded me time and space to look back on my life and take stock of it for the first time. Alongside the need to confront the truth and enormity of all that I have lived through, a beautiful thing emerged: I have started to make a little sense of it, to understand what happened, see patterns, discover meaning, find the love and acceptance and healing in it, and start to forgive myself, to give my young self, especially, some slack for all the bad decisions and self-destructive behaviors.
In my closet there is a locked box of all my journals from the age of thirteen to the time I stopped wanting to write. I had told my best friend and godmother of my child, Rachel, that when I die, she may open the box. I never thought it would be opened before I was gone.
Lucky you—the box is open. I’m going to extensively quote from those journals. I’ve kept meticulous records, all too aware that those pages were the only place I could share the unfiltered truth.
I recently showed my daughter the diary I wrote when I was thirteen, and she said, “You werefucked up.” I mean, my mom was in an abusive relationship when I was little. I gave my first blow job at thirteen. I was madly in love with Johnny Depp at fifteen. I was plaguedby disordered eating and self-loathing from my teens on. It’s all in there. All the way up to me having cancer.
I’m finally free to reveal the true me, and in doing so, I hope in some small way you might be able to come to terms with some of your past, too. Just because life has sometimes been tough—and maybe at certain points it even felt impossible—that doesn’t mean we have to wallow in the darkness or be stymied by our histories. I’m here to tell you that despite how dark it gets, there’s a lot to gain from mining one’s past for meaning.
One of the things I’ve begun to see more clearly through my newfound freedom is that I’m a survivor. Given everything, I really shouldn’t still be here. But underneath all that Susan Applebee (what a woman in Santa Monica once insisted my name was) BS was a radically honest, genuine person who formed real connections, lifelong connections. I’m a good fucking friend, and this world needs more good friends. I survived it all thanks to an abiding passion to overcome, and an unwavering belief in myself, a belief that whatever the world threw at me—and man, it threw a lot, and it’s still throwing—I had to get to the other side of something. I want you to know that the other side is worth the fight. That you are always worth fighting for, and that you are never alone in your fight.
This book is a witness to that survival, and all the things I endured that I never told anyone because it was all too heartbreaking: the good stuff, the terrible stuff, the hilarious stuff, the shitty sad stuff. I have a degenerative disease that has probably ended my performing career, and without that, what is there to hide? And I truly believe that living in truth will liberate all of us: you, me, everyone.
I’ve packed a lot into these fifty-something years. For a long time, it felt impossible to find the meaning in everything I’ve been through, but I have come to understand that we ultimately get to choose whatdefines us—and the working through of that will be what drives the narrative of this book. I will detail what that pain has taught me, and in turn, what it has allowed me to release. I want readers to understand what each of us facing our pain can learn from getting on and getting through.
Many of the revelations about my childhood and much of my life will shock a lot of people. It’s scary—not going to lie—to finally decide to tell it all. Some days, when I open up the box in my closet and turn the pages of the many diaries I keep locked in there, I want to shut it all away as quickly as I opened it. My journals are a contemporary record of a girl becoming a woman and having to fight for every scrap of love she received, and sometimes it’s just too much to read back across those years. I want to save the six-year-old me, the eleven-year-old, the nineteen-year-old, the thirty-two-year-old… But I guess I already saved her, a little bit, at least, because here she is, sharing her most intimate moments from forty years of journaling, all in the hope of showing you that you don’t have to feel alone—you too can find your way, you too can survive. Hell, you too can flourish as I once did, before MS forced me into this prison of a bed.
In my ongoing effort to survive, it’s imperative for me to share my life with you. I hope in doing so that you can know you’re not alone, that someone else has had to survive, and has done so while making people laugh.
There is always light, always, and the deeper I dig into my past, the more good I’m unearthing, the more positives I have uncovered, things I can hold on to on the hardest days. I’ll tell a ton of stories aboutMarried… with Children,aboutAnchorman,aboutSweet Charity,aboutDead to Me,and about the incredible people who’ve been in my life, from my mother to my daughter and so many in between.
There will be happy chapters about my wonderful friends and life, about my daughter’s amazing father and my husband (our love story spans a couple of lifetimes). Sadie, my brilliant daughter, will be a constant character, too, wandering in and out of the book. There will even be an account of my trawlerman boyfriend who is long gone but who now literally haunts my house, and there will be writing about my illnesses: my breast cancer and my MS. I’ll show how my mother got past her addictions. I’ll talk about my faith, and I’ll talk about (and probablyto) God, and about karma, and all the things in between, all the things that I’ve learned that have made me a survivor, things I want to share with readers to perhaps help them survive, too. Because everybody has something, and everyone needs to be seen, this book is my way of seeing, of sharing the details of my life so that others can move forward in theirs.
I’ve called it survival, but it’s really more likefreedom. By working through it all on the page, I intend to release myself fully into a life of acceptance, hope, and joy.
Of course, none of us turn out perfect. We’re always evolving, we’re always changing. I will work through much of my life in this book, but the true beauty of it is that I’m in my fifties and I still don’t know what the hell is happening. What you’re about to read is an account of something that I’ve only recently started to come to terms with. I may never fully do so. I can’t reshape this life into some perfect story with a cherry on top. It was not a perfect life—far from it.
None of our stories are perfect. Every person has a level of sadness. This is just an account of mine.
I don’t have the answers, but I do have a story.
I’ll still be pissed off, of course, but there’s a river of love that runs through this house these days. People come by, sit on the end of thebed, and we connect and reminisce and most of all we share love and hope. This book aims to capture all that.
In every instance the pain will be matched by the joy, the losses mitigated by the extraordinary life I’ve been so lucky to lead. Not even my best friends who sit by my bedside know the full details; sure, they know some of it, but even then, they often think I’m making it up because it is all so unbelievable.
We find the joy where we can. For me, most often it’s in the form of a teenage daughter who makes everything better.
So no, this book won’t be like some big violin scratching for my life. I’m still pretty funny. But it will be real.
So here I am.
Real me.
Lots to say.
ONE
