Nancy Priddy is Applegate’s mother. She features heavily throughout the memoir, enacting Applegate’s lifelong attachment to and reliance on her mother. Applegate repeatedly stresses how much she loved her mother as a child and how much they have been through together. Numerous times throughout the memoir, Applegate holds that she “felt safe; [she] felt safe with her always. [She] always felt safe with [her] mommy” (35). Recursions of this line underscore the close bond that the two shared despite the challenges they faced. 

In Chapter 1, Applegate delves into her mother’s personal history, offering insight into who her mother was before she became involved with Applegate’s father, Bob Applegate, and became pregnant. She was born in South Bend, Indiana, and later moved to Greenwich Village, where “she turned into a stunning hippie sexpot” and began a career in music (19). Applegate describes her mother’s work as a budding artist, stressing her mother’s raw talent and tracing how her relational and familial experiences interrupted her personal artistic pursuits. These aspects of Nancy’s life also parallel Applegate’s own artistic ventures and offer her a connection point with her mother.

Throughout the memoir, Applegate empathizes with Nancy’s experience, even in her most fraught and harrowing moments, such as when her mother was unable to work, was involved in an abusive relationship with Joe Lala, and developed an addiction to heroin. Applegate remembers with gratitude how her mother shielded her from the struggles that she herself was experiencing: “You would never have known she was in such distress. She didn’t behave any differently. I still loved lying in her lap, and she still smelled of that rose perfume” (35). Applegate also stresses how hard her mother’s circumstances were—given her husband’s abandonment, the loss of her career, and her separation from her family in Indiana. Applegate never blames her mother, a stance that underscores her forgiving nature, her efforts to reconcile with her mother, and her desire to relate to other women in similar situations.

Bob Applegate is Applegate’s father and Nancy Priddy’s ex-husband. Bob and Nancy met in Greenwich Village and fell in love after a first date. Shortly thereafter, they “moved west, and lived together in Laurel Canyon on Lookout Mountain” (20), where they tried creating a life together surrounding the music scene. These ventures fizzled when Nancy got pregnant with Applegate. Although the album of photos and letters that Bob made for Applegate reflects his love for her, he soon left the family, fell in love with another woman, and started a new family elsewhere. When Bob left, Applegate holds that she and her mother “were left entirely alone” (26). It took her years to reconcile with her father’s abandonment, particularly in light of Nancy’s subsequent abusive relationship with Joe Lala.

In the latter chapters of the memoir, Applegate describes her work to forgive her father for his mistakes. Their reconciliation came about through their participation in the genealogy show Who Do I Think I Am? Via the show, Applegate helped her father uncover the details of his maternal past. She came to understand Bob better when she learned about his father’s early rejection of him, his stepmother’s unkindness toward him, and his mother’s death. These revelations were particularly shocking to Applegate in light of the contradictory story that her father had told her about his life. Initially, Applegate couldn’t understand how Bob “believed these imagined narratives so fully” (250), but in retrospect, she understands that “no one has an ironclad memory, let alone a willingness to always face the full truth of who they are and what they did” (251), and her father was no different. The grace that she extends to her father underscores Applegate’s forgiving nature and the message of hope and love she espouses throughout the memoir.

Joe Lala was one of Nancy Priddy’s ex-boyfriends. A talented actor and musician, he played percussion with numerous renowned bands and musicians, including Neil Young; Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young; Whitney Houston, and others. In You With the Sad Eyes, Applegate deconstructs Lala’s golden legacy by presenting him in a new light: “When he died many years [after his relationship with Nancy] there were gushing tributes to him […] but the truth is, he was an abusive alcoholic and a junkie” (34). The cold, raw way that Applegate represents and speaks about Lala contrasts with how she talks about any and every other individual in her memoir, illustrating the psychological and emotional harm he did to her at a formative age. Since he was her mother’s abuser, Applegate’s anger at Lala also reflects her deep love for her mother. 

Lala’s impact on Applegate’s life was inherently negative. He introduced her mother to heroin almost immediately after they began dating. Applegate holds that this is one of the cruelest things a person can do: “[B]eing an addict like Lala was one thing; inveigling someone else into that world is another level of evil, especially someone as lost as my mother was in those years after my father left” (34). Both vulnerable and naive, Nancy fell sway to Lala. He gave her heroin to help her sleep. He was present in her life and was a talented musician, connected to the world she’d longed to be a part of; he also had money. The longer their relationship went on, the more abusive it became, but the less capable Nancy felt of leaving Lala. While Applegate empathizes with Nancy’s experience, she does hold that “Joe Lala ruined [her] mom, putting her on a trajectory in which she would struggle with drug and alcohol abuse until only a decade ago” (36). Meanwhile, Lala wreaked havoc on Applegate’s childhood and home life. Caught in the constant turmoil of Nancy and Lala’s addiction and constant, violent fighting, Applegate was forced to seek refuge elsewhere—often in other unstable situations. Meanwhile, watching her mother’s relationship with Lala unconsciously taught Applegate how she was “supposed” to be treated and continued a pattern of abuse in her own life that was similarly difficult to escape.