Throughout Chapters 7-12, Applegate chronicles a series of personal challenges she faced and overcame during her early adult life, furthering her broad exploration of self-empowerment through hardship. In Chapter 7, she details the intensifying dynamic between her and her abusive ex-boyfriend to convey how this experience taught her to value herself. In Chapter 8, she explores the positive impact that her introduction to Hawaii had on her psyche, and in Chapter 9, she details how her experience at the Viper Room with The Pussycat Dolls empowered her through dance and self-reclamation. In Chapters 10, 11, and 12, she describes how new acting and dancing jobs pushed her to believe in herself, experiment artistically, and work hard despite physical injury and emotional despair.

Throughout this section, Applegate traces her personal challenges back to her difficult childhood to develop the theme of The Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma. This is particularly evident in Chapter 7, where Applegate describes how she struggled to free herself from her destructive relationship with her boyfriend. Her reflections on this abusive dynamic provide insight into how this relationship related to her fraught past: “I am an adult now. I can make my own choices. This is the choice I’ve made,” she says of returning to the motel with her boyfriend after he attacked her, “though perhaps just as [Nancy] understood once, it’s something that was no choice at all” (147). In this passage, Applegate balances her youthful and adult perspectives. In the moment, she believed that returning to her boyfriend’s side despite his abuse was a personal choice and a sign of her maturity. She includes an entry from her diary at the time—diary entries operate as a motif throughout the book, contrasting Applegate’s confusion in the moment with her retrospective wisdom—to show how difficult it was to disentangle herself from this boyfriend’s manipulations. Retrospectively, Applegate acknowledges that this seeming choice originated from patterns of abuse throughout her personal history. Via her mother’s relationship with Lala, Lala’s mistreatment of her, and even her grandparents’ relationship, Applegate unconsciously learned to expect and tolerate abuse from men.

Applegate assumes a reflective, even pedagogical tone in the latter pages of the chapter to relate to her reader and to offer life lessons derived from her harrowing experiences. She admits, “Over and over, I’ve picked men who didn’t treat me very well because I lacked the kind of self-worth that denies such men any kind of sway or power” (160). Here, Applegate neither defends nor disparages her younger self. Instead, she owns her mistakes and connects her experience to those of other women who have “stay[ed] in a terrible situation like the one [she] faced” (160). She incorporates sequences of graphic violence throughout her account to stress the entrapping nature of such abusive relationships and the strength it requires to leave them—for her and for many women like her. In widening her discussion from the individual to the collective, Applegate uses her experiences of abuse to create awareness surrounding domestic violence. She argues that abusive patterns are learned over time and that many women stay in abusive relationships because they fear they won’t be able to survive on their own, though she warns that “there is no survival in [these dynamics] either” (160).

Applegate uses vivid imagery to describe how people, places, and experiences helped her survive over time. The healing imagery surrounding Hawaii in Chapter 8, for example, contrasts with the more destructive imagery of the preceding chapter—a contrast that echoes the liberation that Applegate felt in starting anew. Having recently broken up with her boyfriend and anticipating the end of Married…With Children, Applegate “needed to escape” when her costar David Faustino first urged her to visit Hawaii (165). She paints vivid scenes using sensory detail to convey how transformative Maui was and has been to her ever since that first visit. Images including “a canoe glid[ing] across the water,” “a nearby pineapple field,” and “skies, filled as they so often were with the most shooting stars you’ve ever seen, sparkling past” create a restful and magical mood (166). While Applegate couldn’t live in Maui permanently, the place became an escape and helped her withstand her trials or put her personal conflicts into perspective. Throughout Chapter 8, she incorporates diary entries from her various visits to Hawaii, which trace her personal growth. In one entry from 1996, for example, Applegate muses on her newfound spirituality, which she asserts was a major turning point in her life: “For me to tell my diary that I loved myself […] was such a different song from the one I’d been singing for most of my life” (181). Her ability to physically quit her trying life back in Hollywood empowered her mentally and emotionally.

The imagery that Applegate uses to detail her experience with Sweet Charity reiterates her internal strength both despite and because of all she endured in her early life, highlighting the power of Work as a Refuge. Much as she does in her descriptions of her abusive relationship in Chapter 7, Applegate does not spare the gruesome details of her foot injury when she recounts her Broadway experience in Chapter 12. These details align with Applegate’s overarching commitment to honesty and truthfulness. The more accurately she represents her pain, the more accurately she can represent her personal triumphs. Indeed, despite breaking her foot, Applegate danced the entirety of the production throughout its run and was nominated for a Tony award for this performance. Her willingness to endure the pain of dancing on an injured foot suggests that the emotional benefits of dance—the opportunity to embody her deepest feelings in movement—outweighed the physical pain.