Applegate’s detailed accounting of her acting and dancing career over the course of the memoir conveys how work both helped and hindered her throughout her life. From the time she started doing radio ads as a child, working allowed Applegate to help her mother support the family. Applegate never blames her mother for making her work, but rather asserts that she found confidence, strength, and pride in being able to help her mother, who she understood had a hard life. Over the years, work also contributed to Applegate’s understanding of herself, no matter which phase of life she was in or which challenge she was facing at the time:

From a very young age, working was my identity, my everything. Being on set was where I felt most comfortable. I had to be someone I wasn’t, and I found that in the guise of a character I could protect the little scared me. When I was working, I had to be on time and respectful and professional. That world was organized and had rules. I got to escape into someone I wasn’t (42).

Through acting, Applegate found a way to escape her harrowing home life and family situation. When Lala was abusing her and her mother, she could go on set, enter a new reality, and inhabit a new identity. When her boyfriend was abusing her later on, she could retreat from this destructive relationship and find purpose, joy, and connection in her work on set.

At the same time, Applegate admits that work could also distract from the emotional work she could have been doing. She incorporates excerpts from her old journals to underscore how she used work as a distraction. For example, amid her relationship with her unnamed abusive boyfriend, Applegate continued working on Married…With Children but never opened up about what was happening in her personal life: “I was a TV star, and a movie star, a young woman who regularly appeared on talk shows and red carpets […] In private, I was telling myself […] I’m not good enough, not attractive enough to have anyone or have anything that I deserve” (129-30). The contrast between Applegate’s public and private personas underscores how she used work to hide from her troubles instead of confronting them head-on. Only when MS forced her to step away from her acting career did she fully engage in the introspective work of understanding how she came to be who she is.

Applegate’s descriptions of her dancing pursuits, however, convey how work could also offer catharsis. With dance, Applegate explains in Chapter 12, she could feel her “soul through every movement,” “the arms reaching for something, a yearning in the body that amplified the inner yearnings we dancers so often carried” (201). Here, Applegate presents dance as an expression of emotional experience rather than a retreat from it. Some of her most cherished professional experiences, such as her work with The Pussycat Dolls—a burlesque troupe that later became a pop music phenomenon—and her starring role in the 2005 Broadway revival of the Bob Fosse classic Sweet Charity, involve dance, an art form that “expresses all the hurt and anger and sorrow [she’s] felt over the years” (60). She found an outlet in the body for feelings that she could not yet express in words.

Because Applegate is no longer working in the present, she has distance from her vocational experiences and can thus broadly reflect on the positive and negative aspects of her career. In an overarching sense, work has helped her cope with life and taught her how to explore new terrains, make close friendships, and challenge herself personally.