AND SO IT IS...

A memoir of pain, recovery, and, of course, an enduring classic TV series.

When Sigler got a call about an audition for a television pilot, the then-teenager was confused. “HBO was a movie channel making, it seemed, a show about a group of opera singers?” she recalls in her memoir. The series in question was, of course, The Sopranos, which catapulted her to fame, although she almost didn’t audition at all, wanting to go to summer camp instead. Sigler’s book does recount her time on the series, and she makes clear her admiration for its creator, David Chase, and her colleagues, especially James Gandolfini and Robert Iler. But the real focus of the memoir is on how she maintained a career while struggling with health issues: first, an eating disorder (“Suddenly, friendships didn’t matter, my career didn’t matter—all that mattered was calories in and calories out”) and then a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, which she kept secret for 14 years. She also tells the story of her disastrous relationship and marriage with her one-time agent, AJ DiScala, and their breakup (to which Gandolfini reacted, “Good. I never fucking liked him”). Sigler found hope after going public with her diagnosis and after her marriage to baseball player Cutter Dykstra, with whom she has two children. Writing about illness can be challenging, but she does an excellent job, not sparing the reader from the horrible effects of MS; for example, she writes candidly about her loss of bladder control, as well as the difficulty of keeping her disease a secret on sets. She chronicles the mental stress that MS has caused her, but the book never becomes mired in self-pity: “This is not a survivor’s tale,” she writes. “I come from far too much privilege for that.” It is, instead, a moving memoir of an actor who refuses to give up.

An affecting and generous account of an often painful life.