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Selma Blair to Release Memoir Mean Baby in April 2022

Selma Blair
Selma Blair

Selma Blair

Selma Blair is adding published author to her growing list of accomplishments.

The actress, currently the subject of acclaimed documentary Introducing, Selma Blair and best known for her fan-loved roles in Cruel Intentions and Legally Blonde, has written a memoir, titled Mean Baby, due out from Knopf Press in April 2022.

The title is a reference to a little family trivia about Blair, AKA the earliest story she remembers hearing about herself. As the story goes, according to the book's news release, the actress "was a disagreeable child with a terrible disposition" and had the bad habit of biting her three sisters (Blair is the youngest of four).

In Mean Baby, subtitled "A Memoir of Growing Up," the author recounts never-before-shared details from her vibrant, sometimes dramatic life, specifically: "a childhood spent in worship of her mother, an adolescence of love and pain, her destructive ways of coping with an illness she did not know she had, her life as a model and muse, her struggles and successes in Hollywood, and her battle with depression as a young mother."

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Blair, 49, who has proudly stepped into the role of advocate for the disabled following her 2018 diagnosis with multiple sclerosis, also writes about living with the chronic neurological disease, overcoming addiction and how she's rediscovered her own happiness.

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The actress recently shared with PEOPLE that she is seeing "huge improvements" in her mobility and daily life, after undergoing a life-altering stem cell transplant in 2019.

"I'm working on it. Little by little, I can do all these things," she said, adding that she and she and her 10-year-old son Arthur now play football together, having graduated from games of dodgeball. "I just get pelted with balls," she said. "I mean, I can't say I could go running, but I can jog down to the mailbox if I were to practice a few times."

She's also learned helpful techniques to manage her body's minor flare-ups from work with vocal and physical therapists.

"My version of MS really screws with my mind," Blair said. "It's triggered by my own emotions and fears, adrenaline, as well as lights and sounds. I am working on those things. If you see me start to shake, it means my nerves got big. Getting into a ball for a minute and resetting myself helps. Or I'll jump into the cold pool and swim."

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In 2022, Mean Baby will be published in hardcover and eBook formats by Knopf. Penguin Random House Audio will publish an audiobook edition, narrated by Blair herself.

"Mean Baby is one of the most honest, resonant, and empathetic portraits of an artist, daughter, mother, and addict that I've ever read," said editor Jennifer Jackson, vice president and executive editor at Knopf. "From the first pages of her proposal, I felt certain that her writing belonged on our list. What I did not realize, until the day Selma delivered the final manuscript, was how her passion for literature, her love of Didion and Carver and Plath, would be interwoven in the text. The result is a raw, searching, deeply humane memoir, and a gorgeously wrought story of a fearless woman."

Introducing, Selma Blair is now in theaters and streaming on discovery+ and Mean Baby will be available in April 2022.