Minka Kelly Opens Up About Her Childhood Trauma and 'Chaotic' Upbringing in New Book

etonline.com:

Minka Kelly is telling all. The 42-year-old actress opens up for the first time about her upbringing and «complicated» relationships with her parents in her new book, candidly reliving some of her most painful memories.«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,» the star tells in a new interview. Kelly grew up in Los Angeles the daughter of a single mom, Maureen, who worked as an exotic dancer and struggled with addiction, poverty, and domestic violence.

In her book, Kelly shares that she spent time as a young child at the Crazy Girls strip club in Los Angeles where her mother performed and, at one point, she and her mother stayed in the storage shed of an apartment complex after being unable to pay rent for their unit. «If she made a lot of money that night, we'd go grocery shopping at 2 a.m.,» Kelly recalls.«I spent a lot of my youth wishing my mom was something she wasn't, wishing she was like the other moms,» she says in the interview. «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's mother died of colon cancer in 2008. While the pair were estranged for a time, Kelly rekindled their relationship after her mother's diagnosis and attempted to confront her about her childhood experiences.«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 remembers. «I only need to forgive her and love her.