Review
A GOODREADS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
“Elegantly expressed… Evocative… This generous, moving book… roams intuitively, assuredly, between past and present… For years Blair looked to astrologers, mediums, and healers to tell her story… She herself is the right person.”
—Susan Burton, The New York Times
"Blair engages with her MS starkly and movingly...[She] puts it all out there."
—Joanne Kaufman, The Wall Street Journal
“Selma Blair is not afraid to go there when it comes to sharing the ups and downs of her personal life — particularly in the wake of her 2018 Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis — but never before has she shared such shocking details from her past.”
—Kara Warner, People Magazine
“In Mean Baby, an intensely self-aware and cheerfully self-revealing Blair explores the abundant darkness arising from her fraught relationships with her mother, men, alcohol and, ultimately, multiple sclerosis. In different hands, this might make for a more painful read. But throughout her breezy narrative, Blair’s wry humor and her chatty, confiding tone make you feel that you’re spending 300 pages with a smart and, yes, slightly bratty new friend… Blair’s memoir…is funny and frank, a chance to spend time with a brave and big-hearted woman who’s grown up to be not so mean, after all.”
—Jennifer LaRue, The Washington Post
"A beautiful tale about how this person learned to love a new version of herself."
—Rachel Martin, NPR's Morning Edition
“Selma Blair has written a book on survival. Mean Baby, the first book released by the actor, examines the often darker moments of her life. From being violated by an educator during her childhood to seeking refuge in the bottom of alcohol bottles by age 7 and experiencing physical pain that she now believes could have been early signs of MS, she reflects back on it all.”
—Alex Portée, The TODAY Show
“Unlike many celebrity memoirs, which can read as vanity projects, Mean Baby is unflinching: Blair confronts her history of sexual assault, divorce, loneliness, and violence. She strove for honesty, for total transparency…Readers of Mean Baby will also be grateful for Blair’s generosity.”
—Samantha Leach, Bustle
"If you thought you knew Selma Blair, think again.”
—Marie Claire
"Riveting...As a child, actor Selma Blair was known as a troublemaker, a reputation she carried into adulthood. In Mean Baby, her raw, beautifully written autobiography, Blair recounts her difficult road—involving an addiction to alcohol and a complicated relationship with her mother—and shares how her multiple sclerosis diagnosis four years ago was, in many ways, what ultimately saved her."
—Kristyn Kusek Lewis, Real Simple
“Captivating and unflinching… Raw and real, Mean Baby is Blair's life in words — warts and all. And well worth the time because…it's also funny…uplifting…. After a half-century of searching, [Blair] appears to have found her truth... A dazzling and intense memoir.”
—Mike Householder, Associated Press
"Selma Blair is one mean baby and one mean writer! Blair honestly writes about the uncertainty, messiness, joy, and weirdness of living in a ‘broken’ body. Disability is not always constant or known and Mean Baby depicts this reality with compassion and grace.”
—Alice Wong, editor of Disability Visibility
“Mean Baby, Selma Blair’s brilliant book, demands attention. It grabs you by the collar and says listen to all that I have to say: about love, pain, motherhood, illness, celebrity, and the tidal ferocity that pours through all our lives. Read it and be caught in the voice of one of our luminous stars.”
—Esmé Weijun Wang, best-selling author of The Collected Schizophrenias
“Selma Blair will take every expectation you have and shatter it with this beautiful book. It’s less about illness than it is an effluence of hope, just when you can’t imagine anyone having the spirit to summon it. If you’ve ever felt broken or lost, you’ll find yourself on the pages of this book and maybe see a way to the high road when the author writes, To have been so lucky. The rejects and outsiders have spoken, Selma, and we’ve elected you Queen.”
—Mary-Louise Parker, best-selling author of Dear Mr. You
“Mean Baby is straight-up terrific — bold, intimate, sassy, profound — and a vital reminder that the hectic glitter of the exterior rarely reflects the hard-earned wonder of the interior. So, while you might reach for Mean Baby because of the author’s celebrity, you’ll read into the night for her candor, eye for detail, and stunning prose. In an embarrassment of riches, Selma Blair is as talented a writer as she is an actress.”
—Adrienne Brodeur, best-selling author of Wild Game
"Mean Baby is a fascinating exploration about the power of prophecy, of labels, and of one woman's determination to defy them all. Blair is a rebel, an artist, and it turns out: a writer."
—Glennon Doyle, author of the #1 New York Times best-seller Untamed and Founder of Together Rising
"Throughout Mean Baby, Blair demonstrates a rare level of self-awareness for someone who’s been encased in the celebrity industrial complex for most of her adult life...Blair writes with unflinching, unapologetic honesty about her trauma....[Mean Baby] fills in the gaps we didn’t even know were missing."
—Adam White, The Independent
"Blair revisits in this bold and candid debut her odyssey through addiction, trauma, and illness...Blair, in her typical fashion, finds a way to transform her burden into an opportunity, sharing her experience of living with MS with astounding candor and grace. This compassionate and intelligent work will leave fans floored."
—Publisher's Weekly, starred
“Actress Selma Blair always thought of herself as a sidekick or character actress, never a leading lady, but in this illuminating and authentic memoir, she takes center stage as the teller of her own story... The book's first and third parts, covering her childhood and her MS diagnosis (along with the birth of her son), respectively, are spellbinding… A compelling story… remarkably good writing.”
—Booklist, starred
Blair… candidly recounts the events of her life with refreshing honesty…Hilarious and heart-wrenching in equal measure…. In one moment, she discusses biting Seth MacFarlane on the hand, and in the next, she brings readers to tears while talking about her experiences with grief. Blair writes in blunt, witty prose, making this book hard to put down…Witty, funny, heartbreaking, and beautifully written. This book will be loved by fans of Blair’s work and of her MS advocacy.
—Library Journal, starred
“Painfully lovely...[An] elegiac contemplation of [Blair’s] life through the lens of a chronic illness that only recently made her past clear. For those seeking a similar sense of enlightenment, reading Mean Baby is a worthy and affecting undertaking.”
—Linda M. Castellitto, BookPage
9780525659495
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of May 2022: Selma Blair’s memoir is more than a gushy celebrity story of bright lights and glitzy parties. It’s a story about complicated mother-daughter relationships, how childhood interpretations of experiences can shape you, how the need for attention can drive you, how Hollywood kismet happens, and how the public platform it provides can be a force for good. Mean Baby will make you laugh out loud at moments that are at once deeply funny and deeply disquieting. Blair’s life is not all roses—booze entered her life at the age of seven and eating disorders and the darkness of depression is a constant—but she recounts the bittersweet events and details of her life with such specific clarity, honesty, and humor that it’s impossible to not fall under her spell in this page-turning memoir. —Al Woodworth, Amazon Editor --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. About the Author
SELMA BLAIR is an actress best known for her roles in Legally Blonde, Cruel Intentions, The Sweetest Thing, and Hellboy. Blair was named a Time Person of the Year in 2017 as one of their Silence Breakers, and she was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for her narration of The Diary of Anne Frank. She is the subject of the documentary Introducing, Selma Blair, which reveals Blair’s intimate and raw journey with multiple sclerosis. Blair lives with her son in Los Angeles.
--This text refers to the paperback edition. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Mean Baby
I’m not sure how to harness my meandering thoughts into words and sentences that make sense. So I’ll start with what I know.
We are all in search of a story that explains who we are.
As Joan Didion wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” We are made not only by the stories we tell ourselves but by the tales of others—the stories they tell us, and the stories they tell about us.
The first story I was told about myself—other than the one about how my mother watched as the doctor pulled me out from her insides—is that I was a mean, mean baby.
I came into this world with my mouth pulled into a perpetual snarl. I was born with a glower, my face defined by a heavy brow that adults coveted. But on a child—an infant, no less—my face looked judgmental, scrutinizing. No one knew quite what to make of it.
When I arrived home from the hospital, only one of my three sisters, Katie, who was five, was waiting in our driveway. Mimi, aged twelve, and Lizzie, almost two, were elsewhere. Katie rushed out to meet me, my mother holding me on her lap. Katie asked if I was a baby doll for her. No, I wasn’t, my expression said. A few days later, some of the neighborhood kids came over to meet the new Beitner child. Within minutes, they left screaming, warning any-one who would listen, “Do not go over there. The Beitners have a mean baby.” Can you imagine! Have you ever heard an infant described in this way? What could I have done? I was just days old! An infant with a snarl. I only wanted someone to pick me up, I think. Or put me down! But instead they all went and gossiped. From the very beginning, I was misunderstood.
Nevertheless, the label stuck, as labels are wont to do. What people call you does matter. The words we use hold weight. We say this sometimes, as lip service, but it’s true. It’s like having a sticker affixed to your back that the rest of the world can read but you can’t. Before I could even speak, I was told who and what I was. I was mean.
In my defense, I did not have a proper name for the first few years of my life. My birth certificate reads, simply, “Baby Girl Beit-ner.” In babyhood, I was given the nickname Baby Bear. My mom said they called me Bear because I had such a furry head that they would have to rub it to make way for my forehead. (I used to feel bad about this bit of my history, until I read that Rene Russo was born with the same affliction.)
Eventually, my family started calling me Blair—after Blair Moody, my mother told me. A U.S. senator and circuit court judge from Michigan whom she admired. This was funny, because I was so moody. (To this I say: Be careful what you name your kid!) I remember being a Blair, because they would all spell it out when-ever they talked about me, as though I wouldn’t piece it together. “B- L- A- I- R was mean,” or “B- L- A- I- R wants to come.”
This continued until I was three, when I went to preschool and needed a legal name. My mother decided to name me Selma, after her much-adored friend who died around the time I was born. In the Jewish tradition, babies are never named after a living person, and this seemed like a fitting tribute. The other names in conten-tion were Ethel, Gretel—which I would have liked—Marta, Mar-tha, and Gwyneth. (Gwyneth! To think, I could have been one, too!) There came a point where I loudly proclaimed, “When am I going to get one of those names?” referring to my sisters’ nick-names of Ducky, Precious, and Princess. I wanted a pretty name. But it was not to be. From this point forward, I was Selma Blaire Bear Beitner, though my mother eventually removed the e from “Blaire,” because she said it was “too pretentious.” And there you have it.
For my entire life, I have been both. Selma and Blair. My two names would come to define me, as much as the stories around them.
As a child, I never took to the name Selma. It seemed to me an old lady’s name, not a name befitting a little girl. When given a choice, I always asked to be called Blair, but I got a real boatload of “Selma” in elementary school. Whenever the teacher did roll call, I was too shy to ask, “Can you call me Blair?” So all day long I was Selma, or Bat Sheva, the Hebrew name used by the teachers at my Jewish day school, and at home I was Blair. Mom was always sorry I didn’t like Selma. A feminine of Saint Anselm, the Benedictine monk. Or a reference to Selma, Alabama. It was a good name, she often reminded me.
When I was five years old, Mom, Dad, and I went on a weekend trip where I struck up a friendship with a family with a baby. As we lounged poolside, the mother asked my name, and I casually replied that it was Lisa—a nice, normal name. As Lisa, I played with that baby for three hours, helping her navigate the hotel pool in her floaties. When the afternoon sun sank low in the sky, the woman approached my mother and told her that her daughter Lisa had been so helpful.
“Lisa!” My mother let out a wail. “Her name’s not Lisa! What a crock! What a liar!”
The woman looked at me as though she were seeing me for the first time. My lovely afternoon had been erased. I was no longer Lisa, and now I was a liar as well.
My mother nicknamed me Saintly, but it was tongue in cheek. I was no saint. I could sometimes be saintly to my mother, but to everyone else I was a mean baby.
Growing up, I shared a bedroom with my sister Lizzie, since we were closest in age. Our parents let us choose the wallpaper, and since Lizzie didn’t care, I picked a pattern with little pink and blue flowers floating against white. I chose it because it looked similar to what Jessica Lange describes as her childhood wallpaper in the movie Tootsie. Movies, even then, were what gave me ideas and hope.
Our room had two twin beds and those vinyl shades you needed to tug in order to pull them up or down. Every morning, I got out of bed very, very quickly. I had never been one to linger. (Can you believe it?) I rushed to pull the shade down, so it would snap to attention and rip-roll up loudly, sending the diffused morning sun straight into Lizzie’s eyes.
“Yehi or!” I’d yell at the top of my lungs, quoting from the first lines of Genesis, the Hebrew words for “Let there be light!”
“Blair!” she would croak, rubbing her eyes. “Why do you do this?”
Next I made my way around the room, throwing open the door, turning on the television atop Mom’s childhood maple dresser, her mother’s before her, and flicking on the lights. I needed life, imme-diately. I needed every bit of everything, every bit of help, anything I could reach in order to cheerlead myself into embracing my day. Even then, I did this.
This was how our days began. I made Lizzie crazy. But she put up with me. Every night, we said good night back and forth until one of us fell asleep. She was always there with me. --This text refers to the paperback edition. 
![Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up by [Selma Blair]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/416mUu6I0UL._SY346_.jpg)
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Didion again: “There’s a point where you go with what you’ve got. Or you don’t go.”Highlighted by 163 Kindle readers
