You With the Sad Eyes is a celebrity memoir, part of a popular genre that includes recent memoirs like Pamela Anderson’s Love, Pamela and Viola Davis’s Finding Me. These works seek to reveal the more complex or ambivalent reality behind a glamorous persona. Broadly, memoir diverges from autobiography in that it does not attempt to provide a complete chronology of the subject’s life, instead aligning more closely with the narrative conventions of the novel, in which pivotal moments of insight or personal transformation take center stage. 

The celebrity memoir is just one memoir subgenre, and many such works can also be classified as professional memoirs since they describe the authors’ work in show business, sports, and other public fields. Celebrity memoirs are often marketed as “tell-all” texts that publicize little-known facts about a celebrity’s personal life. While a figure might live in the spotlight, their memoir is meant to offer a new perspective on their experience of stardom. In a New Yorker article on the subject, Rachel Syme argues,

Often, though, these books reveal as much as they hide. Autobiography was for a long time the best outlet stars had to talk openly about misogyny, racism, ageism, abuse, and other hideous aspects of life in Hollywood that the industry would rather ignore. For women and minority stars, especially, a memoir could help bridge the gap between what was experienced and what could be said (Syme, Rachel. “The Art of the Hollywood Memoir: Accounts of Life in Tinseltown Reveal as Much as They Seek to Hide.” The New Yorker, 30 July 2021). 

This notion applies to Applegate’s memoir, wherein she details the harrowing, tragic, and often violent aspects of her life behind the scenes. Her memoir offers her a place to process the trauma she experienced throughout her life and to correct false impressions of her that the public may have due to her life in the limelight.

Applegate’s memoir strays from typical expectations of the celebrity memoir subgenre in a few key ways. In addition to tracing how her acting and dancing careers have shaped her identity, Applegate also centers her experiences with multiple chronic illnesses. She explores how her cancer and multiple sclerosis diagnoses radically changed her as a person and challenged the persona she had been trained to present to the world. In this way, the book participates in another subgenre—that of the medical memoir, in which authors recount their own or their loved ones’ experiences with illness or disability. This subgenre includes works like Porochista Khakpour’s Sick and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Applegate’s bold, unapologetic tone also mirrors that of the confessional memoir, wherein writers typically expose surprising details of their lives and explore how secrets or shame have influenced their identities.