I’m Kiki.
Kiki is my real name. Kiki is who I really am. She’s fierce, and free, and she doesn’t have MS or trauma or low self-esteem or a history of bad decisions.
She’s a simple, sweet, sharp, smart-mouthed dancer. Kiki is both who I could have been, and who I really am.
When I first visited, I met a woman who had just had her first child, Pua. Back then, I felt a kinship with Pua, and as I watched her grow, I was so happy that she had no inkling that I was a TV star back in the States.
August 6, 1996, Maui
Pua is the closest thing to perfection that there is. She is the most extraordinary child. I am lifted when I am with her. I am blown away by her magnetism and wisdom. She is a beacon of exuberant light and love. I am so grateful.
When Pua was about three years old, I arrived on the island and rushed to see her—I was so excited, as ever—but as soon as Pua laid eyes on me she glared at me with such disappointment and anger, all haughty and pouty face.
“Hi, ChristinaApplegate,” she said. Auntie Kiki had been lying to her all this time.
Pua is in her thirties now, with two kids and a husband. But she still calls me Auntie Kiki.
So no, my name is not Christina Applegate: it’s Kiki.
I am a troubled and broken and beautiful and smart and interesting and funny person—I am all the things—but I’m not Christina Applegate. The world puts those two names together and I get the heebie-jeebies.
I’m sorry to my mom and my father, but I reject it.
I hate having to tell people that that’s who I am, but when you call me Christina Applegate, you don’t fully understand the kind of onus that puts on me.
Christina Applegate is a character, a person who was beholden to people and production companies and everything and everyone else in this town. And she was someone I never was. When I hear that name, I catch my breath, and yet I also don’t want the world to fully know who I am either. I suppose this book is a small step to showing you all who I really am.
Actually, a big step.
When I see “Christina Applegate” out in the world—except my star down the hill, goddamn it; I earned that—I always think,That’s a weird name.Because for my entire life, no one who loves me has called me that. Almost no one—almost no close friends, almost no family—calls me Christina.
When I was growing up, my mom called me Teenybopper.
To his dying day, my father called me Christina.
Being “Christina Applegate” has affected everything.
For a long time, I felt—well, I guess I hoped—that I lived in a magical world where people really loved me for who I was as a person. But stuck here on this MS bed, I’ve recently been coming to the painful realization that especially when it came to the men in my life, when I met them, they already knew who I was, even if I didn’t know who they were. This was especially true during that formative decade I worked onMarried… with Children.Were men into Kelly Bundy or me?
Recently, this creeping realization has been coming over me: they all knew me. Maybe that’s presumptuous to say, but I wonder if I was just a check mark or a fantasy. They could have “Christina Applegate,” but they could never have Kiki. I kept her buried deep within.Married… with Childrenwas on in ninety or a hundred countries. Later,Anchormanwas everywhere.The Sweetest Thingmay have been hated by critics, but it was popular. So much stuff I did meant that I was constantly in the public eye.
Everyone “knew” me before I knew them. What were they thinking? I always wanted to ask, “What were you thinking when you met me? Did you have a preconceived notion of me, and did I disappointyou?” I am not that person that I played, that Christina Applegate from the TV or the movies. I was scrappier, more profane, more romantic, a woman who wrote poetry and desperately wanted to be loved for who she was.
I remember being on a date with someone when I was in my thirties, and I was so excited. We went to the Hotel Bel-Air, to have dinner and drinks. I sat there talking to this guy, being my usual self. We were friends already, but this was the first time we were trying the romantic thing.
But I could see his eyes glassing over, and he was clearly not interested in anything I had to say. I thought I was being cute and funny and flirty.
“Am I bothering you?” I asked. “Do you not want to talk to me?”
“No, no, no. Totally,” he said vacantly.
It was evident that I wasn’t his cup of tea, and it kind of broke me. Because that happened so many times: people had a preconception of who “Christina Applegate” was—even friends I’d known for a while—and when they met Kiki, they didn’t recognize her.
Even thinking about it to this day, it makes me sad. Am I not who people want me to be?
I think I disappointed people, and worse, I don’t think they actually wanted to get to know who I really was.
But then you can never live up to something that doesn’t exist.
