Selma Blair’s Mean Baby is a jaw-flooring memoir of alcoholism and being ‘raped, multiple times’

“I wish I could see what I would’ve been like without alcohol,” says Selma Blair, the actress who made her name in the 1999 teen drama Cruel Intentions. She was only seven when she became hooked on the “relief” she found in bottles. In the opening pages of her memoir, Mean Baby, she describes the “revelation” she felt taking her first sips of sweet Manischewitz at her family’s Passover celebration.

“A light flooded through me,” she recalls, “filling me up with the warmth of God. I felt at one with my ancestors.” Then came a grim realisation: the glow she felt was coming from the refilled glass and not from God. “It wasn’t spiritual; it was scientific. That was heartbreaking to me, because it was like finding out that Santa Claus wasn’t real. It was also very convenient that I made this discovery at the table, where there was a glass of wine in front of me.” That night she got so drunk she rolled around on the floor, wept and woke up with no memory of being put into bed.

A few months later, she found a book called Sarah T: Confessions of a Teen-Age Alcoholic and devoured it. The tragic tale of a lonely misfit was obviously intended as a cautionary tale, but Blair took it as a how-to guide. “What an adventure!” she thought. “This is how I’m going to be OK.” Reaching for the tallest bottle (Amaretto) in her parents’ liquor cabinet, she promised herself she would be “the best alcoholic a girl can be.” And she continued to seek solace in booze until 2016, when she was stretchered, screaming, from a plane after mixing wine and sleeping pills.

The first half of Mean Baby does an agonisingly good job of explaining why Blair wanted to check out of herself. Born and raised in Detroit in 1972, Selma Blair Beitner was the youngest of the dazzling, ambitious but acid-tongued judge Molly Ann Beitner’s four daughters. She describes slipping from her mother’s body like “a martini olive” and – according to family legend – appalling all visitors with a low, scowling brow that made her look like a “mean baby”.

Blair internalised the label and dares readers to hate her by listing the many, many mean things she did as a kid. She stropped and stole and lied and shouted into the faces of kindly strangers. “In fourth grade,” she says, “I dared Ilyssa Wolin to swallow a row of staples so I could have her jeans when she died. I vaguely recall her folding the pointy ends inward with her purple-polished nails and swallowing. Even though I wanted those jeans I must have been relieved when the day ended without her sudden death.” At her grandfather’s funeral she “punched every man who came near us in the nuts”. She regularly slipped one earring into her pocket before telling the adults around her that the expensive piece of jewellery had gone missing, so they all have to stop what they were doing to crawl around on the floor searching for it.

But when you learn how worthless Blair’s mother made her feel, it’s not surprising the child wanted to claw back a little power. Judge Beitner often told her youngest how she’d wanted to have her aborted. She had no aspirations for her child. And when little Selma admitted to feeling sad and anxious, her mother assured her that if things ever got too bad the pair of them could go out to the garage, run a hose from the exhaust into the window, and stop breathing together. Blair “studied and revered” the mother whose approval she could never win, inheriting her critical view of the world along with her “deep appreciation for a body of water, a drink and a cigarette, and a great suit”.

Alcohol cost Blair her first friend at the age of 10. In her teens she became a blackout binger. In one brutal passage, she describes being sexually assaulted by two strangers on Spring Break. “I don’t know if both of them raped me. One of them definitely did,” she writes. “I made myself small and quiet and waited for it to be over. I wish I could say what happened to me that night was an anomaly, but it wasn’t. I have been raped, multiple times, because I was too drunk to say the words ‘Please. Stop’. Only that one time was violent. I came out of each event quiet and ashamed.”

Blair is frank about the cycle of shame and obliteration that escalated in her early years in Hollywood. But her writing loses its kick in the second half of the book.

The sharply drawn family character sketches are swapped for a long list of encounters with “lovely” A listers. There are awful boyfriends and she describes a phase during which she would bite fellow celebs to get their attention – until Kate Moss bit back. There are swanky parties and lots of designer dresses. Then there’s rehab – where she throws Britney Spears’ flip flops in the bin – and the booze is swapped for the eating disorder that Blair always knew was lying in wait.

Nasty rumours are spread about her and they appear to have originated at the home of her father, and then a boyfriend. Finally, there is motherhood, sobriety and a Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis which helps the actress make sense of many lifelong neurological complaints.

Readers will be happy for her, even as they tune out a little. The jaw-flooring first half of Blair’s book should succeed in its goal of offering companionship to anybody else “trying to find the deepest hole to crawl into until the pain passes”.

Mean Baby by Selma Blair is published by Virago at £18.99. To order your copy, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books