Alyssa milano biography book

Alyssa Milano has received many offers to write a memoir throughout the years. But sitting down to chronicle her journey just wasn’t appealing to her — until 2019. “I finally felt like I was at a point in my life that I could reflect back and also look forward without hesitancy or trepidation,” she reveals. Instead of a traditional trek through her past, the Charmed star penned a series of essays that showcased how she was feeling in a time when the country was approaching a controversial presidential election and a global pandemic was beginning to surge.

Milano affectionately refers to her latest endeavor as “an unapologetic look at my life.” In Sorry Not Sorry, which debuts on October 26, she discusses everything from challenging the notion that giving birth is “magical” to her long-haul battle with Covid, what happened after she sent that tweet that set the Me Too campaign viral, and why she thinks some forms of cancel culture should maybe be canceled.

Shondaland caught up with Milano, who discussed a few of the essays in her book, like her mentality behind dealing with the backlash of being so vocal and how being an ally means she sometimes makes mistakes, which she’s grateful to be able to clean up in the public eye.

NICOLE PAJER: First off, how are you feeling after your long, hard battle with Covid? And what did you learn from going through that experience?

ALYSSA MILANO: I’m starting to really understand what resilience means. Everyone has already said, “You’re so resilient.” And that never really resonated. I didn’t understand what that meant. To me, it was like, “I’m tough? I don’t want to be tough.” But after really spending time on this book and diving back into the things that I’ve done and experienced and also Covid, and then this accident that happened with my Uncle Mitch, I realized, “Yeah, I am resilient.” I get what that means now. It means that you’re not only tough, but you’re also willing to help other people along the way.

I would say I am 85 percent better. I still have some lingering joint pain. But, I gotta tell you, all of my long-haul symptoms got much better after I got the second dose of Moderna. So, the vaccine actually helped me to feel better. It was really scary. And the one thing that has really changed is having an appreciation for my health, which I think I just took for granted for many years.

NP: You have an amazing ability to stand up and speak out for so many different groups of people. How do you deal with the backlash of being so vocal?

AM: I just got to this point where I realized if you’re gonna make real impactful change, you have to be courageous enough in the quest for what you’re fighting for. I know in my mind that what I’m fighting for is fair and just, and that is more important than any bruised ego I may have from people being hurtful. You have to diminish the ego to do this work. Because, let’s face it, so few activists actually see the cultivation and the harvesting of the seeds that they plant. You can’t really be attached to an outcome. And you have to be courageous enough to be disliked.

I have a group of fans that have been buttressing me since day one, who have loved me throughout all of it and who have formed their own friendships based on their love of Charmed. Those are the fans that I look to as a barometer of if I’m doing this right. They’ve been so incredibly supportive. And if I can keep the eye on the prize of wanting to make people’s lives better, and then have this support system that I have that really understands and appreciates what I bring to the table, what else can you ask for as far as fulfillment?

NP: In the book, you open up about living with generalized anxiety disorder. Did that just amplify the chaos of the past year for you?

AM: It was really interesting and hard for me to wrap my head around, but it was sort of like everyone else was functioning in the same frequency that I normally function in. Everybody was functioning in this place of high anxiety. I was like, “Yeah, you see what I have been trying to tell you for the last 25 years. It’s all scary!” So, I really did okay. What wound up happening was my anxiety got bad again once I turned in the book and we started talking about the press tour. That was the thing that stirred up anxiety for me. During the pandemic, I felt like everything was so much bigger than I had control over, that it was easy to go with the flow.

NP: How do you manage your anxiety when it does flare up?

AM: The way my anxiety works is it has a very physical manifestation. And if it’s not blatantly apparent why I would feel anxious, then I just start to plug things into “oh well, it’s just because of this.” And it could be true, and it could not be true. I just try to make sense of my physical manifestations of anxiety by trying to plug in why I’m anxious.

There are three things that have really helped me. One is meditation. It’s not easy, but it is something that is really beneficial when you get the hang of it. I collect houseplants, and I do a lot of work with repotting them and getting my hands dirty, feeling that grounding feeling of digging and watering and nurturing and taking care of raising something. And I started watercolor painting. Oh, my gosh, it is so relaxing. Both my kids play sports, and I get really nervous at games. And I actually just started bringing a little paint set and doing some painting while I’m watching the kids. It’s been a great way to be there to support them, but not to have panic attacks.

NP: I love how you open up about being an ally and admit that sometimes you get it wrong. But then you allude to the fact that it’s better to try and get it wrong than to not stand up at all.

AM: I get things wrong all the time, whether it be words or things that I’ve said where I’ve tried to push the envelope a little bit and gotten some blowback. And I feel really blessed actually that I get to make those mistakes in such a public way because I feel like it helps for people to see that you don’t have to be perfect to be an ally. But also choose to work through those mishaps with humility and grace. My biggest fear is always that the blowback I get is going to deter people, like young actors looking at my feed who might want to fight for something substantial. And then they look and see, oh, the trolls, or how even under the best intentions, people cannot appreciate what I’ve said or how I said it. It always worries me that they would fear using their own voice because they didn’t want to deal with that. But I think part of it is really doing the work publicly, which also means that when I have mishaps, they’re going to be very public. It is up to me how I deal with that. And hopefully I can guide other people to deal with those moments with their own sense of grace.

There are a lot of great resources on the internet, and people, if they have a cause or issue that’s important to them, should educate themselves, empower themselves to the best of their ability, so that they can make a difference. I would say 50 percent of my day if I’m not acting on a show is doing research, reading articles, reaching out to organizations about how I can be of service to them. So, a great way to start is to actually do some research on the issue. And then allow yourself the empathy and compassion and the self-love to know you’re not always going to get it right. And that if you get it wrong, you’re gonna try harder so you get it wrong less the next time.

NP: Youmention cancel culture and how we might need to cancel cancel culture. Do you feel like it has gone too far?

AM: I don’t know that it’s gone too far. I just don’t think that it’s effective. I think obviously the people who do the worst crimes of why they would be canceled, people like Harvey Weinstein, there’s no coming back for those people. Harvey is going to rot in prison exactly how he should. But what about the people who their experience is more nuanced or lives in more of a gray area, or didn’t break the law but was just, like, really crummy? We’re not canceling them in the sense that they’re never going to work again. So, what’s the point? I understand holding people accountable, and we absolutely need to continue to do that. But a whole dismissal of a human? I don’t think it’s healthy. And it’s not healthy for anyone to think that they have that kind of power. I always joke that people have been trying to cancel me since the ’80s, and I’m not going anywhere. There are a lot of great gray areas here.

I think that there has to be a path back for people. We can’t put all these people that we’ve canceled on an island and be like, “Okay. See ya!” If a person is willing to go through that process publicly and learn what was insensitive or what was wrong, and there’s some kind of reconciliation, then I think it’s an important step. At the end of the day, it should be about holding people accountable for having opinions that are hurtful or harmful to someone else’s progress, or any sort of oppression — any of that is so, so wrong, and we should hold all of those people accountable for abuses of power, all of that. But then what?

I use the example of Aziz Ansari in the book. And I think that’s a really good example because he clearly made the woman who came forward incredibly uncomfortable. She felt violated, and it was incredibly traumatizing for her. But he did not break the law. And she has said that. So, is it fair that his career was taken away from him? His livelihood was taken away from him? Maybe some people would think that’s fair. I don’t think that’s fair. And if it’s not fair, then what do we do for reentry? And I really think we need some sort of reconciliation process.

NP: You also get real about how hard your son’s birth was. Are you sick of hearing women say their birthing experience was “so magical”?

AM: I feel like it is such a projection of what we’re expected to feel about it. And I’m sorry; I didn’t like it. I love my son, and I love being a mom. But labor and childbirth was really hard for me. It was really invasive. It was trauma for me. And I know a lot of women who feel that way and have not been able to just say, “You know what? It’s not fun.” We make these flippant jokes about it, but it’s really awful.

We’re not preparing our women to do this by saying it’s magical. In all the birthing classes that you take, nobody tells what happens after you give birth. They talk about that as the end game, giving birth. That’s the goal. And, no, it is just the beginning. With Milo, I was 18 hours. I pushed for three-and-a-half hours. Then I had a cesarean, and they cut into my muscles, so I couldn’t walk. It’s more like five weeks because you’re in so much pain.

We’re selling ourselves short instead of trying to make men understand the trauma and the pain of it. We kind of suck it up. And I think that’s a real disservice too because I’ve never felt more of a miraculous being than in pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding. I felt like I finally knew what my body was made to do and how it is such a perfect machine. I grew a human, without an instruction manual, in my body. And I think we need to get real honest about the process.

NP: Being on the frontlines of a lot of these issues, you’re confronted with other people’s trauma and stories. How do you deal with the constant heaviness of that in conjunction with balancing your own past trauma?

AM: I’m definitely more prepared for those moments now. When I first sent out the Me Too tweet, making the Me Too movement that Tarana Burke started go viral, women were coming over to me in random places and grabbing my hands and looking at me right in the eye with big, chunky tears in their eyes. They would just say, “Me too.” And I would say, “Me too.” But what I realized was I had really denied myself the process of dealing with the trauma that I’ve had in my life up until that point. I thought that I had dealt with that. But really I just stuffed everything away. And I was like, “I’m fine; I’m fine.” And then once I was being approached by so many strong, powerful women, I realized that I had to really start to heal myself if I was going to be an impactful advocate in this space.

I give a lot of credit for my own healing to Tarana Burke because she was the first one that recognized that through hearing everyone’s stories — and it’s because she has been doing this her entire life. But she called me about two weeks after the tweet hit, and she said, “I was just thinking about you. I wanted to know how you’re doing. I know this is probably hard. And so, I just wanted to see how you’re doing.” And I was like, “I am not okay!” That was really the impetus for me to do some real soul searching in therapy and really try to heal that trauma with therapy and psychiatrists. But being someone who is an activist, I always go to this place of like, “Okay, I’m healing myself, but what happens to the millions and millions of people throughout the world that don’t have access to mental-health care? And how are they doing this?” Erasing stigma has always been a running theme throughout my activism, but I think erasing the stigma of mental-health challenges is really important. We’ll all heal if we can be able to erase the stigma and really pressure our elected officials to make sure mental health is a priority when we’re talking about health care.

NP: What do you hope that people take away from reading this book?

AM: I hope it makes them think about things that they wouldn’t have thought about before. I also hope they find their own voice and their own strength, their own courage to be disliked or just be loud, or to be a safe place for anyone else who might be struggling. I hope they feel inspired. I hope they get a better idea of who I am as a person and how this work really fulfills my heart, my being, my soul. I feel really blessed that I am given the opportunity to make such profound statements about things. And also I feel so grateful that I’m able to hand over the mic to people who have more profound things to say. And to share my platform with those people has been such a gift and a blessing for me. It really does put all that into perspective. This is a very self-indulgent industry that I am in, so to have something that is more substantial behind the motivations of why to keep going in this business, it’s important for me.

Nicole Pajer is a freelance writer published inThe New York Times, AARP, Woman’s Day, Parade, Men’s Journal, Wired, Emmy Magazine, and others. Keep up with her adventures on Twitter at @nicolepajer.

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