Jamie-Lynn Sigler had her reasons for writing about her allegedly toxic marriage to now-ex AJ Discala in her recent memoir.
“There was a lot of healing, particularly around my first marriage. It was something I had wanted to forget and never talk about. It was really volatile, it was really toxic,” Sigler, 45, said on the Thursday, June 4, episode of the “Viall Files” podcast. “I really intended, when writing the book, that this isn’t a takedown of anyone.”
In her memoir, And So It Is: A Memoir of Hope and Acceptance, which was published last month, Sigler called her first marriage “a mistake.” Sigler and Discala, 55, were married from 2003 to 2005.
“This is an opportunity to share my story. I didn’t want to hurt anyone in any retelling of anything,” the actress stressed on Thursday’s episode. “I needed to be honest and I needed to be truthful of what happened, but because of that intention, I was really able to see his side and also really remember how much we loved each other even though it ended badly. He did love me, and I did love him.”
According to Sigler, she was able to “offer forgiveness” to both Discala and herself in writing And So It Is.
“[I can see] I was doing the best I could, we all were,” she acknowledged. “I didn’t expect to have that healing.”
Shortly after Sigler and her then-manager tied the knot, the Sopranos alum was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
“I got diagnosed with MS right in the beginning of it,” Sigler exclusively told Us Weekly in her May cover story. “It was almost like all of these things I had to make worth [it] … like, this relationship had to work.”
At one point, Sigler claimed that she fantasized about her death to cope with her health and marital struggles.
“I don’t think I’d relived that moment until I wrote it,” she told Us. “It was like as I was getting towards it, it’s almost like the memory resurfaced fully, and it wasn’t even really about suicide. It was like a cry for help. I needed someone to know how much pain I was in. I needed somebody to know how terrified I was, how overwhelmed I was, and he was going through his own thing, and he couldn’t see it. I couldn’t share it with anybody else. It was just a desperate cry for help, and I was terrified.”
Sigler continued at the time, “I knew that I didn’t want to be with him, but I was terrified to be without him. Who would protect me? I had no idea about my finances. I had no idea about anything. Could there have been things that he said back then to make me feel that I would never survive without him, sure, but I also think that I felt that whether he had said that or not, because I was so dependent on him for my survival and to protect me.”
Sigler eventually found love again with now-husband Cutter Dykstra, whom she married in 2016. The pair share two sons.
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