Katey Sagal has opened up in her new memoir Grace Notes about body image insecurities, Hollywood parenting, and dating KISS frontman Gene Simmons.

Known for playing Peg Bundy on Married With Children, her life has been anything but ordinary.

Starting off her career as a backup singer for Bette Midler, she experimented with drugs with childhood pal Lorna Luft (Judy Garland’s daughter). Her mother died in 1975 and her father (director Boris Sagal) died after a helicopter accident while filming a stunt in 1981.

In an interview with Hollywood Reporter, Katey goes into detail about the process of writing about her very unique life.

“The beginnings of the book were somewhat easy because there wasn’t going to be a book,” she said. “It was really more like a journal that I was writing for my children. I just spent a lot of time with my parents which was an interesting thing because they’ve been passed on for a long time. So, I kinda journeyed back in my brain and in my heart and tried to remember what I remembered.”

She reflected: “Singing with Etta James was great. Singing with Bette Midler was great. Having my children was a great experience, even though I don’t actually talk about the process. What I got from the book after I finished it, and read it back, really reflected on it, was I’m a person with a lot of duality.  I like the moments that are happy moments of my life, and I don’t like them that much. It’s weird.  It’s just a dichotomy that seems to have always been with me.”

When it came to writing about her addiction: “For me to talk about my addictions means I have to start— talk about where it started, which definitely was body image. And I became addicted to diet pills. Then I became addicted to alcohol. I’m sure the influence of growing up in Hollywood had a lot to do with that, you had to have a certain— this is a very hard town to grow up in and my body image became sort of something that not only I focused on, but my parents focused on too.  So, I knew that that stuff would all come out in the book and then, once again, I never really saw myself as the way some of my characters have portrayed themselves as. I know people used to think Peg Bundy was so sexy and I didn’t really perceive myself like that. Because once you’re a fat adolescent, you never quite lose that.”

Read the full interview at Hollywood Reporter.