You might recognize Minka Kelly from Friday Night Lights and Euphoria, but her brand new memoir Tell Me Everything (releasing May 2) shows a whole new side of her story. The memoir gives us an inside look into her childhood, bouncing around the country as she was raised by a single mother who struggled with addiction and worked as a stripper.
In an interview with People, Kelly says she wants Tell Me Everything to help women who "might have complicated relationships with their mothers, feel less alone [and] to know that we don't have to be a victim of our circumstance."
Kelly's grace and optimism allows her to find the silver linings of her childhood — even though it was difficult, she also describes it as colorful and chaotic, noting that it made her adaptable. Acting became a place where Kelly could channel all of the emotion she didn't know how to process otherwise. After a few guest roles, she landed popular girl Lyla Garrity on the family sports drama Friday Night Lights in 2006.
"I found acting before therapy, so it was my first sort of place where I got to learn who I was. And that's a big part of acting is knowing what you have to offer," she says.
She credits her first acting teacher Janet Alhanti with helping her grow and develop as a woman: "No one had ever seen me the way she did or called me on all the bullshit that I was offering, and that felt really good for someone to be a little hard on me."
Kelly and her mother eventually reached a point in their relationship when they were no longer speaking, and it wasn't until her mother began to get sick that they began to mend their relationship.
"I spent a lot of my youth wishing my mom was something she wasn't," Kelly continues in the interview. "I only was able to really appreciate how special she was when I got much older. In fact, when it was maybe a little too late."
Kelly's mother passed away from cancer in 2008. However, she knows that, even though it's tempting to focus on the past, there is still so much of her story to tell: "I'm a work in progress I think like a lot of women out there."
You can pre-order Tell Me Everything here, and check out our email newsletter for more inspiring celebrity content.
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