Minka Kelly is getting candid about her traumatic childhood.
The "Friday Night Lights" star built a successful career as an actor and model, but things were not always easy for Kelly, who grew up in poverty as her mother, Maureen Kelly, worked as an exotic dancer to try to pay bills while facing addiction and domestic violence.
"I spent a lot of my youth wishing my mom was something she wasn't, wishing she was like the other moms," Kelly told People. "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, 42, further opens up about her childhood in her upcoming memoir, "Tell Me Everything." She recalled going to the strip club where her mother, who died of cancer in 2008, worked in Los Angeles.
"If she made a lot of money that night, we'd go grocery shopping at 2 a.m.," Kelly said. "My childhood was colorful and chaotic, unstable and inconsistent, unpredictable and hard a lot of the times. But the silver lining is that it made me a very adaptable person."
Early in her book, Kelly writes that at age 17, she began performing in peep shows at an Albuquerque adult-video store. She was determined to support herself.
"I started with the scariest part," she said of her book. "The part that I carried the most shame about, the part that I felt the most embarrassed of, the part that I hid my whole life, and the part that I've had people make me feel bad about. And I felt like that was just where I had to be the most brave."
Kelly would later go to school to become a scrub nurse before she began modeling and acting. Then she landed a role in "Friday Night Lights."
"I was terrified because I was in way over my head," she said. "I was learning as I was going. So you see me on that show literally learn how to do what I do. Funny enough, at that point in my career, I was very curious about what people thought of me. And I have to be honest, reading a lot of really mean things about me helped. I was just able to read the feedback constructively."
Throughout the years, Kelly's mother would weave in and out of her life. They grew estranged when Maureen Kelly asked her for more financial support. It was only after she was diagnosed with colon cancer and given two years to live that they reconnected. It took confronting her mother about her upbringing to rekindle their relationship.
"I saw her start to crumble in shame and regret and pain when she was already in so much of all of those things, and I just immediately thought, 'I don't need to do this to her,'" Kelly said. "I only need to forgive her and love her. She's already broken. What is the point of pouring salt on the wound? I'm fine. I just want to take care of her right now."
Commenting on her book, Kelly said she hopes it will help those who "might have complicated relationships with their mothers feel less alone."
"And also to know that we don't have to be a victim of our circumstance," she added, noting that writing it felt cathartic and allowed her to embrace "all the darkest, most scary parts, the parts that I carried a lot of shame about my whole life."
"It felt very liberating to sort of own my history as opposed to feel like I need to hide it anymore," she said.
Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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