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Christina Applegate is where she has spent many listless, painful nights over the last year working on her memoir: in bed.<\/p>\n
She passes most of her days inside a bedroom of her home in Laurel Canyon, a neighbourhood of Los Angeles in the Hollywood Hills.<\/p>\n
It is already not a great day when we connect over video conference in late February \u2013 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 \u201cc*** on a cracker\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m sick as a big ol\u2019 dog,\u201d she explains. She raises up a heating pad \u2013 nicknamed Jake Ryan after the brooding heartthrob in the 1984 romcom Sixteen Candles<\/em> \u2013 that has been warming her body.<\/p>\n \u201cHe dies a lot,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd then we have to get a new Jake Ryan. He\u2019s actually on my abdomen right now and making me happy. I love Jake Ryan. He\u2019s really my bestie.\u201d<\/p>\n He may provide near-constant heat therapy, but readers of You with the Sad Eyes<\/em>, she says, may take on the role of therapists.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n