Babylon Confidential

October 15, 2012
Soap-operatic memoir of a minor screen and TV star's slow descent into booze-fueled hell and her long, slow road back to recovery. The specter of alcohol and addiction always seemed to dog Babylon 5 actress Christian. Her grandfather had been an alcoholic, and her father was a man who recognized, and walked away from, his penchant for drink. When the author was only 8 years old, her brother was killed by a drunk driver. Fifteen years later, as a young actress living in a Los Angeles apartment, she landed the role of a cocaine addict in the 1988 film Clean and Sober. Christian was not then hooked on either drugs or alcohol, but she was living life in the "Hollywood fast lane," doing "blow," drinking and having indiscriminate sex with both men and women. Until her early 30s, Christian was primarily a recreational drinker. However, after becoming entangled in an emotionally destructive affair with Braveheart actor Angus Macfadyen in 1996, she "drank to escape." Another bad relationship followed, as did longer and longer stretches of unemployment. By 2002, she had sunk deeply enough into alcoholism that she could no longer control her urges to drink. Neither stints in rehab nor AA meetings helped. On the verge of giving up, she discovered a low-cost alternative treatment, the Sinclair Method, with "an 80 [percent] success rate." Amazingly, Christian never blames her childhood--which included rape by a neighbor and troubled relationships with her parents--for any of her later mishaps. But neither is she at a loss to tout her "glory days" as a B-list actress or to serve up occasionally entertaining but at times overdone Hollywood dish. A National Enquirer-esque peep show of a book partially redeemed by its underlying mission to cultivate awareness about a little-known method of alcohol detoxification.

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