Christina Applegate 2026: Memoir Out Tuesday, Largely Bedbound From MS, Robin Roberts Interview Airs Tomorrow

Christina Applegate is having the most emotionally significant week of her post-diagnosis life. The Dead to Me and Married With Children star has said she spends a lot of time in bed now because of her multiple sclerosis. Her memoir drops Tuesday, she sat for a major television interview airing tomorrow, and today the New York Times published its most intimate profile of her yet — all conducted over Zoom from her bed in Laurel Canyon. Here is the complete picture.

You With the Sad Eyes: Christina Applegate's Memoir Releases Tuesday, March 3

Applegate's upcoming memoir follows her from her early and tumultuous home life in Laurel Canyon in the 1970s and 1980s to her stardom on the sitcom Married With Children and beyond. A Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis in 2021 confined her to a king-sized bed and the company of memories she'd rather forget — memories of the self-doubt and body dysmorphia that stalked her meteoric rise, of her mother's fight against addiction and abuse after her father left, and of the tax life had taken on her body and mind that was suddenly coming due.

Applegate told People: "We all have come from somewhere, some places more painful than others, and it's what you do with it, I guess. This is not an inspirational book, by any means. But it can inspire." She described the book as being about a little girl with sad eyes who ended up becoming Christina Applegate — and said those sad eyes remain, but she is now a stronger, different, and resilient human being.

The New York Times Profile Published Today — She Planned to Burn These Journals

Today's New York Times profile found Applegate via Zoom in her Laurel Canyon bedroom, reclining against a tall headboard in a black T-shirt, a crescent moon necklace, and a floppy topknot, Pepto-Bismol and Lay's barbecue chips on her side table. The detail is both mundane and heartbreaking — a Hollywood icon, the biggest child star of the 1980s, reduced to a bed and a bag of chips by a disease that has no cure. She originally planned to burn the journals that became the source material for this memoir. She made a book from them instead.

Christina Applegate's MS Health Update: Largely Bedbound, 30+ Hospitalizations

Applegate confirmed that things have progressed to the point where she now spends most of her time in bed. While she isn't quite fully bedbound, she admits she struggles with daily tasks. She has been hospitalized over 30 times since her 2021 diagnosis, often in what she describes as "unimaginable pain" — subjected to CT scans, every test known to medicine, and pain levels that have required emergency care repeatedly.

The one routine she protects above all else is taking her 15-year-old daughter Sadie to school. "I tell myself, 'Just get her there safely and get home so you can get back into bed.' And that's what I do." Her daughter Sadie once told her: "I missed who you were before you got sick." Applegate's response was devastating in its honesty: "I miss who I was before I got sick too. Very much."

Robin Roberts Interview Airs Tomorrow on Good Morning America

Christina Applegate is sitting down with Good Morning America's Robin Roberts — a deeply symbolic choice, given that Roberts herself has battled serious illness and is one of television's most trusted interviewers for conversations about health, resilience, and survival. The emotional interview airs Monday, March 2. A preview clip shows Applegate in tears, saying she wanted her book to reach everyone who has survived trauma and pain: "I know there's a lot of people who have been abused and have lived really hard times, and I just felt like, 'I'm here for you.'"

Christina Applegate Now: Advocacy, Podcast, and Platform for MS Community

Applegate is still working — just in a different capacity. She co-hosts the weekly Apple podcast MeSsy with friend Jamie Lynn-Sigler, who also has MS, and their conversations focus on friendship and finding humor in difficult situations. She founded a nonprofit, Right Action for Women, and serves as an advocate for breast cancer awareness and MS research. She is also launching Next in MS — a new platform for others living with the disease to tell their stories. Christina Applegate is 54 years old. She is not disappearing. She is just doing everything from a king-sized bed in Laurel Canyon — and somehow making it look like courage.