Poured Over: Selma Blair on Mean Baby

“But then when I read that Raymond Carver said he didn’t have the ability to write, you know, a full novel. He was a sprinter and I thought, Oh, maybe I could do it. Is there any such thing as a half a paragraph short story, because that was all I had the focus for. So, it took me a long, long time to write this book.” Actress (Cruel Intentions, Hellboy, Legally Blonde), model, muse to Karl Lagerfeld, mom to a young son, subject of an indelible documentary (Introducing, Selma Blair on discovery+), now author of the memoir Mean Baby, Selma Blair joins us on the show to talk about the title of her book, her relationship with her mother and mentors Ingrid Sischy of Interview Magazine and Carrie Fisher, her love of Joan Didion and C.S. Lewis, the village that came together to help her get her memoir into the world, living with multiple sclerosis and much more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. And we end the episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Marc and his bookseller guest Becky.

Featured Books:

Mean Baby by Selma Blair

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis

Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.

Full transcript for this episode of Poured Over:

B&N: I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and I’m so excited you guys I know I say this every episode but Selma Blair is here and, yes, you know her from Cruel Intentions and Hellboy and Legally Blonde and Introducing Selma Blair on the Discovery plus channel. You also know her as a muse to Karl Lagerfeld and we’re going to cover a little bit of that she’s the mom to Arthur, and she’s also known author Mean Baby is out. And we’re gonna talk about the title of this book. Selma, we have to talk about the title.

Selma Blair: I mean, how can a baby be mean? But yeah, in fact, I have that ubiquitin I am a mean baby. And I will wear it like a badge of honor. From days gone by, I wish I had it in me to be a mean baby. Still, it comes out.

B&N: You’ve talked about your eyebrows as a baby. Sorry. That’s a great story.

SB: My eyebrows I could like into Brooke Shields and make myself feel very, very beautiful at a young age, but the forehead, as my mother would say I say forehead but I still try and emulate my Philadelphia mom and say farid. People will laugh but it brings my mother closer to me. Right? May she rest in peace. I had a tiny forehead. And I daresay it was a joke, but I’m not sure but that it had to be kind of robbed to make way for my face. So maybe that is I don’t know if that is an old wives tale created by my mother, the old wife. I like that. But I had read it in our school coffee table book that Renee Russo also had this charming affliction. So maybe it was my mother’s way of like carrying something close to me because I don’t remember any forehead rubbing episodes farhid. But then again, I would have been a baby. I’ll take it. I believe that I’m very hairy on the face.

B&N: You all said lady though I’m just totally changing the subject. Right. Thank you. I don’t even know how to follow that up because you’re a hard act to follow.

SB: I see things a little oddly, you know, it’s just, you know, I’m such a fan of Raymond Carver. And in no way do I speak like him, but I try to frame my day like it’s going to end open ended like a Raymond Carver short story. If you ever think you know where to go with this drop a bomb mean, baby, there’s a certain cruelty, almost like that you can turn something that’s comfortable to me, but not real. It’s just a word. It’s a reading thing. Do you know what I’m trying to say? We’ve already gotten off track. Go ahead.

B&N: That’s okay. Going off track is fun. That’s the whole point of this. But it does bring me to your love of story. Because I think there are probably some folks saying wait a minute, what’s someone doing writing a book. But you’ve always been a big reader, you’ve always kept journals. You wrote your first book I, Selma when you were six.

SB: The dog, I guess I always I mean, as soon as I had a pen, which I found for the first time I had a whole house. But we have a junk drawer with pens and broken pencils and nubs. And I don’t know why I never thought I could take it upon myself to use that it was the first time honestly, as the baby of a family, you just aren’t thought of to make sure you have the notebook and this and that went to the four seasons. And next to the bed is a little yellow pad and a pen. And I could have it it was like something from the borrower. So the little, you know, it was just for me a little tiny pad. And I thought, well, this is perfect. I’ll write my autobiography. It’s just the right size for a six year old me. So I had these pages just for me. And I wrote about what I knew at six, which was love and the handsome boys and a lifeguard with holes in his gym shoes. And I spelled it all wrong. But my mother really was enchanted, and I couldn’t believe it, that there was something in these few words she proclaimed good. And you know, they were she was a reader herself. And I think she really did want to write and I think she was impressed that I would just string some words together that were maybe not as sophisticated but they were true. And they were simple and she saw something and encouraged then I kind of had the fear in me afterwards that I’d produce something so went down to the basement and finished I, Selma in a notebook but came across it maybe in eighth grade when we were starting journaling in school and I was so mortified by all the complaining I was doing in I, Selma. Of all the pain I was in it was really just about that I pain and teeth pain and I was afraid I was fat and how I couldn’t run and all these things very telling and I was embarrassed and I threw it away and I would do that. I have tons of journals and some I would throw away embarrassment and shame and some I kept on and they were reference points for this book.

B&N: So how old were you when you discovered Joan Didion because you were a really big Didion fan.

SB: I think everyone is a Joan Didion fan my gosh, I discovered Joan Didion in 1979 when my mother bought a navy blue Stingray Corvette and I dare say maybe Joan had a 1968 or 69 Stingray, but my mother’s was the last year with that beautiful front curve, you know that swooping curve that the stingray had. And I remember seeing a picture of Joan that I now own I bought one but the the famous picture of Joan with the cigarette against the white Stingray with her sweater dress and her sandals. And she just was so cool and young, but yet old and she reminded me of my mother and I knew my mother had the car so immediately I put Joan and Mother together and they were both very spare with their words and quite journalistic even the way they spoke. But I read probably Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I don’t know, maybe 20. I read it again when I came to California and I had read everything but it was really Year of Magical Thinking once and which is obviously much later that stole my heart so much and to think she could write the Year of Magical Thinking while her daughter had died. And never mentioned Quintana Roos death. It stayed so focused on John Dunn and that experience that telling exactly and his head on the bar and the drink in their apartment. She set things so clearly and without sentiment, sometimes to the point I was gobsmacked when I learned that Quintana Roo was dead when she wrote that I mean gobsmacked with appreciation for her ability to focus and remain committed to her salvation in the clarity of her writing on this of course, you know things fall apart it took so long for me to even realize that was originally someone else’s quote. You know, because I so associate her she told that time things falling apart of the center not you know, the center will not hold. She could turn a phrase like nobody else and make an understanding so deep for our generation. I love everything about her. I’ve never met her but I keep her pictures here on my wall. That picture I bought before she died when I decided I want to write a book so I could have Saint Joan looking over me. Oh, but I do wish I met her but oh, I would disappoint I would disappoint so it’s best I didn’t. I dare say I won’t now because as I like to say about people, she’s dead. I don’t know my mother used to do that.

B&N: We’re gonna get to your mother in a second but the part of why I bring up Joan Didion beyond the fact that I share your fandom. She’s pretty terrific.

SB: People don’t ever think she’s overrated. She is not you know now you get the backlash because everyone loves and everyone knows Joan and people say oh, it’s all Joan Didion people just grab it. Joan Didion that’s like you twit. Yes, I will grab a Joan Didion. She has earned that and it is always, always appropriate. In any situation, you can find a Didion quote.

B&N: Well, and we’re just going to ignore the people who don’t get it. That’s that. Joan was also diagnosed with MS. And obviously that is a big part of this book is your diagnosis and you’re learning to live with MS. And all of the years that you were misdiagnosed. And as you’ve said in the book, you can’t speak for everyone with MS because it’s different for everyone. But you can show up. And you show up in a really big way for yourself and your kid and the community and those of us who don’t really know that much about MS. And that’s a really important part of the book. But Joan Didion is part of how you got here. And I don’t think that’s necessarily a leap that everyone’s gonna make. Can we talk about Joan and your mom for a second because they are these two women. They’re iconic. They’re larger than life. You even describe your own mom Molly as being sort of like the first movie star you ever met because of the way she presented herself in the world and I love that.

SB: My mother to me is unbelievably glamorous, because I was lucky enough that she was a woman that loved to make up her face very much like a stage actress. And she was I think because of things that happen trauma in her past that she never really spoke up. She was an incredibly private person even with me, she never wanted to show any cards of weakness. And she was an incredibly brilliant witty and not altogether kind person. She did not suffer fools. I felt very much in the club being her favorite, which she openly admitted to the other siblings and they understood. They understood favorites because she was difficult and she was my favorite. So it was okay, we had each other I put a lot on her. I put a lot on her shoulders as the person my idol. And so of course, the criticisms they were much weightier than perhaps other people would deem it or what my sisters would think of her criticisms because she was every egg in my basket. I mean, that is all I cared about. I appeared when I was young, when my mother dies, I will follow suit, you know, there will be no purpose for me to keep on living. And she did want me to write, she did encourage things. I hadn’t read enough. And so I had to keep reading. And she really encouraged that, so that I could find a way to write and that she would edit it one day, and I never thought I would be able to do it without her. But I did. And I wish she was here for it. Oh, I went off on a tangent didn’t I? I’m sorry.

B&N: That was a good tangent. But hey, was it your mom who introduced you to CS Lewis? Or was that school?

SB: Gosh, you know, it was my mother who introduced me, of course, to CS Lewis with The Chronicles of Narnia. But I have no idea how I found till we have faces, and I will say that beginning line of that book to myself all the time now, I’m older now. And I have nothing to fear from the gods. And she goes on into my body as a lien carrying and I do not have but I have a son. So I do have something to fear from the gods. But whenever I am in real fear about something, I will think of the heroine of till we have faces who’s basically like a goddess, you know, myth of psyche and Cupid, which I am not familiar as much with Greek astrology my mother was, and I have no idea how I found this book. I’m old now. And if not much to fear from the anger of gods, I have no husband, nor child, nor hardly a friend through whom they can hurt me. And that is what I felt I would feel whenever my mother died, that I would be free because there would be nothing to attach me nothing anyone could attack or do because my mother was all I cared about. But as cruel fate would have it, I dearly dearly love my son. So I’m still able to be hurt in this world. But other than that, those words have just been very comforting for a fearful person, you know, the thought that I would get there where I would not fear the anger of the gods. I don’t know how I found it. It was one of those things where you’re in the bookstore, and I would just search and search and open that front page. And sometimes it just gets you and I would give it to everyone. And I don’t know if they felt the same way about this book. But I did. And then a fan and friend gave me a first edition of it. You read how much and we became good friends after that.

B&N: That’s a very cool story. Let’s talk about sort of the theory behind story. I mean, is that how you ended up being an actor on top of it is wanting to inhabit someone else’s story.

SB: It was never, never a consideration that I could be an actress. I cannot believe I became one. To come from a Hebrew school where so much of my day was spent reading the Torah. We did not get into books, except for Anne Frank, and the Holocaust books, you know, and so we didn’t get into authors other than Jewish authors. And when I showed up at Cranbrook, and there was a teacher, and we were reading sounds with the first book, and he is on the trenchcoat, and newspapers are falling in his blonde hair. And immediately you’re set in a book and I just enjoyed it so much. I still didn’t think to write I just was like I love reading. And it would have been a natural thing. But my own self esteem was such that I didn’t focus. But then when I read that Raymond Carver said he didn’t have the ability to write, you know, a full novel. He was a sprinter, you know, and I thought, Oh, maybe I could do it. Is there any such thing as a half a paragraph short story, because that was all I had the focus for. So it took me a long, long time to write this book. And in the meantime, story was happening to me through acting, so I took it where I could get it, but it was really just auditioning for a school play. Because I wanted to read these plays. I just was so excited. I never had these opportunities in this parochial school and I was terrible actress. I was such stage fright, but it was actually I got in a school play that was directed by Todd Kessler, who did Sopranos episodes and is an incredible writer: Damages, Bloodline. These are his and he was my dear friends. You can see it in the acknowledgments. I didn’t want to put him in the book because he one ups me by being so amazingly talented, prolific, well-known and everything. I haven’t yet been in this writing world, but he and I did Mrs. Robinson for one act, and a teacher actually poo pooed me and said Martha Butler said, Oh, that’s disgusting. You know, you’re getting undressed in front of the children. It’s so risky, because I would wear the bra and underwear. I just felt fearless when I was in a good story. You know, as Mrs. Robinson, it wasn’t me and Todd to have such a brilliant person by my side, the words could do anything. And then I thought, ok, I’m not qualified for much. I can read. I can write a little, but I can read on stage in my head. And you know, so I did approach it as a reader, not an actress. It was just a way to get in more reading time and get, you know, brought to life.

B&N: Your acting career also brought you into the world of one of your mentors, which I actually didn’t know this until I read your book that Ingrid Sischy Interview Magazine was your mentor. It’s amazing.

SB: Ingrid did, I was the West Coast like kind of roving editor, but I was on the masthead. I mean, she did such wonderful things for me and I would just, God if it were now with Instagram and I would really toot my own horn but I did not know of such horns to toot nor you know, but she did give me a real meaning in my days. I can’t even recall how I met Ingrid. Maybe it was through doing a piece for Carl and a photograph he came to do in my house and we had such a time together and talking about books and the people that she was so invigorated by and she was such an unlikely candidate to be such a tastemaker of fashion and everything, you know, she was very bookish and glasses and not a stitch of makeup and really rat’s nest of a hairdo but she knew I was depressed she could tell instinctively, and we had lunch immediately after this and she said you are a writer right? You don’t know. You don’t know. You’re a watcher and so she put me to work right away. She said that you’re depressed you gotta write. I said, I can’t I don’t have anything to write her out. She said, well, good here write about these people find people find people interview them. And so I did. And it was torture because it’s torture to show up sometimes among the people you admire. And she never once even criticized me you know, she was such an environment over there that you really did get so inspired to meet these people interview them that just by the mere act of talking about them you’re not having talking to them you know your own writing. It takes a backseat it was for them these creators and I was behind some of it and finding people. It was the most special place I had been allowed in the most rarefied air that she took me into and meeting the designers, the wardrobe artists of our lives. You know, Versace, mutua Carl and Inez and Vinoodh, all of them doing mu mu campaigns and having my moment of modeling which must have pleased my mother to no end and me. But it was the writing it was the belief she had in me and I wish you were here so I could write for her essays are so incredible. She was such a thinker. I’m much more kind of just in my heart, heart on my sleeve as I’ve begun this journey, but it’s all for Ingrid. And it’s all for Carrie and my mother. These are my trifecta women. But Carrie really led also just by the way she was and her giving to me and all of us. I mean, she had people living in her house on her grounds ad nauseam. I mean, everyone was there, James Blunt. There’s a picture of him at my wedding, which was in our backyard, and I didn’t know who he was yet. She was helping build him up because she was staying in her guest house writing his first album. So by the time I got those pictures back, I was like, holy smokes, that’s James Blunt. Love him. And like Carrie, you know, she was a collector of brilliant friends, and to be included with those people by these women. I appreciate it now more than I ever have any idea then.

B&N: And Carrie Fisher, this is the Carrie you’re referring to, is Carrie Fisher. She was also a writer. She was known very quietly as a script doctor in Hollywood, but she’s also written a number of books, all of which are screamingly funny.

SB: I mean, of course, Postcards from the Edge when I was little, I read that whenever that came out, and you know, I read her and Nora Ephron. I mean, there were so many women that were really had a very solid warm approach to their heartbreak and their misfortunes or the nature of pain and relationships and connecting it really presently. And Carrie did that. And with movies that went back and forth with Carrie, she was so present in my viewing life, but she did of course, she wrote Postcards from the Edge and then Surrender the Pink which might have been did she do that? I remember that being a bit naughty. Or maybe I’m but I did read it. Maybe that’s just the title that’s bring me up and then Shock a Holic, of course, and the Princess Diaries, there’s so many and I open them and even though they’re not the weightiest of books in length, she really packs a punch. And she taught me just by being that sometimes no conversation can work out, even if it’s with yourself in a book, you know, she has so many fractures in her life that were so beloved by all of us. She turned that.

B&N: And also she’s very honest, I mean, yeah, there’s a lot of humor in these books, but she’s very honest about who she is as a person.

SB: Oh, as I mean, she was the pioneer for so many of us. For emotional health, mental health things we were afraid to call it them things certainly my mother was afraid to call it probably why know so little of her life, even though I don’t think she was actually mentally ill. But I think people accused her of that and it takes away a lot of power. I don’t think she was mentally ill, but I think it made her a distance. And she was afraid because I was also a raw kind of person that needed this very immediate connection with people. She was worried for me she had a dream that I was young and told me I was publicly burned at the stake. So I think when I did become somewhat of a public figure, she then got worried and wanted me to come back home, she had these real kind of scary feelings of what could happen to a woman. And we loved Carrie even before I met her for her ability to bring that to life and with some humor, so people could really stomach it. And we owe her a lot about being able to talk about this openly. And I did talk about real raw things in this book, because of probably the permission Carrie gave me and the permission to find some laughter even in the things that there is nothing to laugh about. Maybe not laughter, but just the side of it, that’s ridiculous, that you can find this funny, I’m still learning it.

B&N: You have a very wry sense of humor in this book. And I don’t want people to miss that. Because there is a lot you cover a lot of your life in under 300 pages, right? You do not waste words, young lady. But there’s a lot and obviously, we’re going to let people experience the book for themselves and read what you have to say. But what was it like for you, as the writer sitting with your life experience, I mean, your body is evolving as the MS progresses.

SB: This was probably the most brutal assignment in my life. So far, you know, I went into the stem cell, I had a bone marrow transplant, but autologous, which is I used my own marrow instead of having to go outside myself, which was also very poetic that after all these years, I could still go inside the deepest part of me that hadn’t been touched by some shame or fear is how I interpreted it to rile up the whole nervous system, and that it was within me. And when I did that, there really was some appreciation that I could pass in this somewhat risky procedure to halt the progression of this really sort of aggressive, long, long flare I had of MS. So I took stock and I knew from funnily enough social media and things were I had written very simply, but but honestly as I could, and the support that was given to me, before stem cell, when I was even officially getting sober for the last time after a public and private humiliation, and that people were there more than not, so that I could kind of picked myself up was staggering to me. I’ve never had that in my life. I’ve only beat myself up more or been beat up more when I’ve made a mistake. So to be honest, and immediately accept and acknowledge and take responsibility for what I had done. There was such an outpouring and help that I really used and there’s a girl Ty Birani, and Julia Testing and the real young girls that kind of picked me up and supported me young 20-something, you know, that showed me incredible grace. And I wish Carrie had been alive. But I created her in my mind for myself, like, what would I do for my son in this moment? What would I do and people were giving me the support and saying, You should write a book, you should write a book. And I thought, God, if even they think I should, maybe someone will read it, and maybe they want it and maybe they find with my simple words, that there is some saving grace for them. The little Selmas out there. And so as I was like, going of the old Selma, it was time to write something but how do you write when the stories were kind of held in time and kind of an eight year old mean baby mindset? It had to get very simple and I also, I did discover truths. You know, you think I you know, the old stories, and then there was a rape I didn’t even ever think about for years or the way I might have treated someone, what led to the breakup, that Jason Schwartzman really felt he had to leave me. These people weren’t at fault. It was a real reckoning. This wasn’t a tell all of my mom might have hurt me, although it can be read that way. And some people might say, oh, abusive, not that wasn’t my judgment. It was just the fact these things affected me things she felt or said, but we also had a grand old time often. I mean, we sat in bed and ate the precious faces of gummy bears and looked at them with magnifying glasses as we watched America’s Funniest Home Videos and downed martinis. We had a good old time we were like Edie and Edie. Before as a teenager, we were just a very kind of theatrical duo. And I loved her and I miss her. I miss her. As her brain was kind of going and mine was with MS. But I was looking to rebuild mine as I am the daughter and it all went in good time. That was my mother’s biggest fear that I would go before her. She loved us so much. And her biggest fear was that the children would go before the parent so there’s no real tragedy in my life. My child is alive. I’m still alive before my mother. Everyone’s happy. I’m going home. I’m like next week to bury her. Finally, she died in COVID. And writing this book in COVID alone and to answer your question, you said, Oh God, you had this procedure in your writing. Yeah, it was hard. My brain was simplified to the point that I could not recognize it. I could not type because that still, I still can’t type on a computer keyboard because that push pull of two hands together working is like patting my head, rubbing my stomach, and it sets off a whole trigger of like speech block spasms spasticity. So to realize I was finally ready to write a book and pitched it, outline. My book agent really was in there in the trenches, like really trying to focus for me helped me and then I get to writing. And it took me three years to recover from stem cell I couldn’t see at all from MS damage, and then maybe chemo things got blurry, so I couldn’t see and I couldn’t type. So this entire book was written on a yellow legal pad with pictures sent into my book agent. Every time I had a writing session of 10 pages, 10 pages, 10 pages, I’d send it in. God bless her. She would type, because I couldn’t type. I longhand wrote this whole book or on my iPhone and notes and then would forward it.

B&N: That’s amazing. That is amazing.

SB: A huge thank you to the village that came together to help Mean Baby find the earring. What it was, like it was like, wow, you know, everyone, like dropped the birthday party and helped me try and physically figure out this book and disability equation that I hadn’t even thought of. And I had finished the documentary The stem cell and COVID and my mother died. And it really was and I couldn’t see and I couldn’t eat. I was vomiting from I think it was the carbidopa levodopa, that was helping with some spasticity for, I was projectile vomiting. So writing the book was excruciating. And I’d say to my book agent, you know, I’ve been out of practice for a while and I’m half blind at the moment and okay, and she’s like, just do it every morning. And then what do you do when every morning I couldn’t stand the daylight. So I couldn’t write until nighttime, in my whole recovery. So there were so many things that I was purposely or not purposely procrastinating. It took a lot to get this on the page. And I was terrified. I was terrified how personal but that is what I needed to give to see if, just to be of use. To be of use.

B&N: You really showed up you showed up for yourself and you showed up for readers and I cannot wait for folks to get their hands on Mean Baby which is out now. So Selma before I let you go, though, because we have to talk about the packet like you’ve been on the cover of Vanity Fair, you’ve been featured in Vogue, you’ve done fashion campaigns. And now your face is on the cover of your very own book.

SB: I don’t know which means more to me, that I loved by Peggy Sorento so much and I’m so young and beautiful. And I have to remind myself like, Hey, that’s a lovely girl. First of all, Peggy Serota did this cover and I shot this actual this actual photograph, I shot this on the day of the Legally Blonde premiere, I had a photo shoot and I think it was for interview and Peggy did that. And I remember she was commenting, like, oh, you turn sideways. How are you so thin, where’s your guts? And I was like, I don’t know, right? They’re very thin, but then I turned the other way around very wide. So it’s like the Selma and Blair. But anyhow, so and that was also the day I met Chris McMillan and then I wore a dress by Ralph Lauren that looked like a bow tie my mother told me and showed up and cozied up to the beautiful Reese at the Legally Blonde premiere and so that was a great day. So this is on that cover cover but inside how precious the end pages has letters I wrote to my mother a picture of my son and here a picture of me in seventh grade with Ed Begley Jr. in the background on the TV. I mean, it’s just the real deal. And then even the necklace there’s a necklace that’s so important that my mother gave me.

B&N: So if you take the dust jacket off the book, you’ll see the imprint.

SB: And it’s a gold necklace that means so much it was my happy sad and because I was a moody child who didn’t feel well a lot and didn’t have a lot of words how I do now I am a checker box but this had you know the frown on one side and my mother for all i might slay her in this book at times for being like maybe a tad neglectful, it might read but she did the most important thing for me one she told me I always had to have a book with me it would save me at the DMV or spiritually and she gave me this necklace when I was six and one side was a smile and one side was a frown and it had a little bob haircut like I do a little bowl haircut and it was such a again, revelation that I could just wear that frown side and people would know it was just a trickier day for me and that she gave me that acknowledgement that those moods were equally important. That’s a damn fine mother. That’s something to remember. And I love her dearly.

B&N: It does come across a bit.

SB: There’s a little Carrie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds and me you live nearby, I would certainly ding dong ditch her like, Debbie, but my mother, she was, um, she was an incredible mother and made me feel very safe and very much like a child, she thought that was important. But at the same time, I was the child that was much more mature then than I am now. And I think part of it is because I could feel her pain and I wanted to be an ally instead of a child. And now I’m definitely learning how to look back at that and forgive myself for some things I held myself much more accountable for, you know, than I need to, but also real responsibility of other things, of course, and, you know, that’s what we do is we go through things that things we thought, oh, that certainly made me a hateful person. And then I look at it and say, Oh, you were five. You know, I really thought I was an evil person for that earring trick I did. I mean, my whole life I really was if people say I’m a nasty bitch, I deserve it because of what I did to that poor mother. And and then you look back and you go, my son has done worse than that. And I still love him.

B&N: Yeah, you’ve written a really human story and you’ve lived a really human life Selma Blair.

SB: Yeah, this isn’t my idea of a celebrity memoir. But please buy it so I can be a bigger celebrity and I’ll write a bigger memoir.

B&N: I know that sounds like a pretty great plan. Selma Blair, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. Mean Baby is out now and it’s a great story and you really should go get it now.

SB: Thank you so much. I love your podcast. I love being on it. And thank you.

B&N: Thank you