Selma lays bare her addiction to alcohol, her devotion to her brilliant and complicated mother, and the moments she flirted with death. There is brutal violence, passionate love, true friendship, the gift of motherhood, and, finally, the surprising salvation of a multiple sclerosis diagnosis.
An intensely self-aware and cheerfully self-revealing memoir. 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 ... Despite its darkness, Mean Baby is also entertaining, particularly when Blair writes about her friendships ... She offers brutally honest accounts of her symptoms and struggles, including frequent falls, inability to focus, memory loss and incontinence. As she did in the 2021 documentary film Introducing, Selma Blair, Blair renders these disheartening details with humor. This is no pity party ... The documentary delivers the full weight of her condition in a way the book cannot ... As a fellow MS patient...I would have liked to read more about Blair’s course of treatment leading up to her decision to undergo HSCT, or hematopoietic stem-cell transplantation, a Hail Mary approach that is generally considered only when all other therapeutic options have been tried and failed. But Mean Baby is not WebMD. Blair’s memoir of her life thus far 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.
Blair became an actor, but her memoir, Mean Baby, opens with sentences that echo the rhythms and concerns of her early idol [Joan Didion] ... You have the flat declaration about Los Angeles, you have the movie business, you have neurasthenia, elegantly expressed ... Mean Baby is not an illness memoir. It is a traditional autobiography, in that it covers the whole of Blair’s life so far. But M.S. haunts the book ... Blair’s disease offers her a new way to see her past, and she uses it to divine her own history ... Blair describes her childhood in a series of evocative anecdotes. While they sometimes seem like notes one might use to tell a story rather than an actual story, together they accumulate power, especially those about her mother ... She is discovered and off for Los Angeles. Once Blair makes the cross-country move, her book loses some of the spell cast by the early section. At one point, she uses the phrase 'all the charming people I had shared something with during my Hollywood life' — that’s the vibe of these pages ... Blair also told her [story] in a recent documentary, Introducing, Selma Blair, an intimate film that does some work the book doesn’t. From the memoir alone, I didn’t get a visceral feel for Blair’s symptoms ... 'I have no ability to organize. I can only choose one memory at a time,' Blair writes of the way her mind works these days. Where the book reflects this is also where it has the most power, in the memories Blair handles one by one ... A generous, moving book.
Ms. Blair presents these and other shockers with a matter-of-factness that can be viewed as a coping strategy or as frustrating glibness ... Readers who are hoping for some dropped names won’t be disappointed ... Ms. Blair engages with her MS starkly and movingly...Still, Mean Baby is tough going. Some of the trouble can be put down to an abundance of 'look, Ma, I’m writing' turns of phrase ... But much of the difficulty in Mean Baby comes from witnessing Ms. Blair’s ceaselessly bad decision-making ... To her great credit, Ms. Blair puts it all out there. And—God love her—she knows she’s no picnic.
