In her new memoir, Minka Kelly made it clear that she isn’t a lot like her iconic Friday Night Lights character, Lyla Garrity — but that doesn’t mean some of the onscreen tears weren’t real.
“The rest of the world seemed to think my life looked like Lyla Garrity’s, that I’d been born into wealth and found myself adored, judged, and maybe even envied by so many. But I knew the truth,” the 42-year-old actress wrote in her new book, Tell Me Everything, which was released on Tuesday, May 2.
Kelly began the memoir with a note to the reader, explaining “some names have been changed” to protect the privacy of individuals. “As we all know, memory is fallible, but this narrative recounts as truthfully as possible the ways I remember things and the way they felt,” she wrote, pointing specifically to her chapters about her childhood. “Now, I can see the love that had been offered, even if I didn’t see it at the time.”
Throughout the book, the Euphoria star recalled living in the storage room of an apartment building after her mother, Maureen, could no longer afford the rent, having a front-row seat to see her mom work at a strip club when she was 7 and turning to work as a dancer at a “peep show” at video store herself at the age of 17. According to Kelly, her mom — who died in December 2008 after a battle with cancer — became “unpredictable” at times, did drugs in front of her and left her with friends for lengthy periods of time.
“Sometimes I think an abortion might have been best,” she wrote about her mother’s decision to keep her and raise her. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad to be alive and for the opportunities I’ve had, but it still breaks my heart to recognize how unprepared my mother was, maybe even constitutionally ill-equipped to be a mother in any genuine way.”
In a profile published on Tuesday, Kelly told The Cut that she’s “made peace with so much of my past, but is “so afraid of falling back into my people-pleasing, codependent role that I can sometimes exert my boundaries very strongly. My girlfriends say to me, ‘We get it, but can you just be a little softer?’”
In addition to a three-year relationship with Derek Jeter, Kelly has been linked to Chris Evans, Trevor Noah and most recently, Imagine Dragons frontman Dan Reynolds.
“Now I know why I outsource my self-esteem to men and put up with so much s—t,” she told the outlet. “I have this high pain threshold. I re-create dysfunction in my life because that’s what’s familiar to me.”
In the memoir, however, the only public romance she goes into detail about is her “toxic” relationship with former Friday Night Lights costar Taylor Kitsch.
“I have had some incredible relationships and have learned so much from them. Some of those men became very good and dear friends, still active in my life now,” she wrote about her love life. “Others helped me learn how trauma showed up to help me break patterns, and others still only seemed to trigger more pain. Each time, though, I learned something about the parts of me that needed healing.”
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