“My fan mail,” I joked, but he didn’t laugh. He looked embarrassed. Well, who wasn’t?

“Some fans,” I mumbled to myself as I added the letters to the growing mountain on my desk. I hadn’t opened a single one. Even then, I knew it was nuts. Look at me, the famous actress in her gorgeous riverfront home, living her fabulous life. Was this someone ’s idea of a joke?

In their increasingly frequent correspondence, my current group of “fans” expressed hurt, disbelief, sadness, and regret. But it was still early in our relationship. They had yet to progress to anger, hostility, and retribution.

Dear Lorraine,
I’m sure it has slipped your attention that your account balance of $36,590 is six months past due. I know how busy you are, but . . .

Lorraine,
I hate to bring this up, but the law firm is after me about when they can expect another payment on your past due account, which now totals $1,422,872.23 . . .

Lorraine,
Your check for $940 for the hearing transcript bounced. Please send another check so I can process your request.

Lorraine,
Republic Bank will immediately commence foreclosure unless they receive a payment of $41,065 . . .

Lorraine,
I hate to be a pest, but . . .

The phone rang. I considered letting the machine pick up, but on the fourth ring, I grabbed the receiver.

“Lorraine?” It was my manager, Heather. Her voice sounded strained. “Have you read the script?”

“Huh? Umm, it’s around here somewhere,” I said vaguely.

“It’s been two months,” she pleaded. “They’re waiting to hear.”

“I know, I know.” I looked around the room. Where had I put the damned script? “Heather, I don’t think I can handle another script about the mob. I mean, how many Mafia roles can a girl play? If that’s all they think I’m capable of, then shoot me now.”

Heather was getting tired of me. “Lorraine, will you do me a fucking favor? Will you read the script? The guy’s coming in Tuesday. He wants to meet you.”

“Fine, I’ll read it,” I shouted back at her. “You’re a pain in my ass, Heather.”

“That’s why they pay me the big bucks,” she said, and hung up.

“Mafia television garbage,” I muttered. Was my career in the toilet or what? I needed to make some real money here, and they were sending me television pilots about mobsters. Jeez. No wonder I was depressed.

Ialways figured there were two kinds of people in the world—the cheerleaders and the grumps. I was a cheerleader. The pep talker. Always ready with the pom-poms, always up for anything. I’m your girl. You need someone to take a carload of kids to a horse show? Call me. My energy knew no limits. I could sew a hundred sparkly beads on a costume for my daughter Margaux’s school play, cohost a benefit with Bobby Kennedy for Riverkeeper, and still be on a set the next day, raring to go. But as 1996 drew to a close, my razzledazzle had definitely fizzled. The cheerleader had left the building, replaced by a listless, middle-aged woman who couldn’t get out of her freaking pajamas until midafternoon.

I felt stagnant. Not calm and still like the Hudson River on a mild day, but stale, like a swamp, a place lacking a fresh infusion of life. When I first started feeling down, I’d told myself that I was worn out, and who could blame me? I’d just come through a six-year custody battle for my daughter Stella that was so horrible and so bruising I felt like I’d been beaten up. I’d won my daughter, which was a huge blessing, but lost everything else: my friends, my dignity, my reputation. Despite my work in movies like Goodfellas, I was a good two million bucks in debt, and on the verge of losing my house. I had my two beautiful daughters and a husband, yet I was as alone as I’d ever been in my life. My marriage to Eddie Olmos— only a couple of years old—was shaky at best, and it looked like I was going to be losing that, too. On my worst days, I imagined being penniless, having to pack up my daughters and move back in with my parents.

What the hell? I was an Academy Award–nominated actress. Famous, glamorous, living in the big house overlooking the Hudson River. I was the envy of the ladies in the local PTA. People stopped me in the produce aisle of the supermarket to ask for my autograph. If they could see me now. If only they knew.

When the court awarded me custody in September 1996, I didn’t even have a chance to be elated. It should have been over, but of course it wasn’t; there would be appeals and endless wrangling over child support, and the steady flow of bills, bills, bills. I just couldn’t take it anymore. Eddie was working in Los Angeles, and our longdistance marriage wasn’t working at all. I needed a shoulder to lean on, and it wasn’t there. In the past, I might have felt sorry for myself and had a good cry. But at this point, I was too numb to cry.

At first I thought I just needed a few days to get my act together, a little time to recuperate. But a few days turned into a few weeks, then a few months. And I wasn’t feeling better. I was feeling worse.

My days took on a blankness, one after the other, one day the same as the next. Thank God I wasn’t a drinker, and I didn’t do drugs; otherwise, I’d have been a goner for sure. Thinking back on how vulnerable I was, I really feel for people with substance-abuse problems. But my days were devoid of such drama. After Margaux and Stella left for school in the morning, I’d sit with my coffee, aimlessly paging through magazines or staring out at the river. Sometimes I’d get a surge of energy and put a load of laundry in, then forget it until Margaux discovered her favorite shirt mildewing in the machine and screamed, “Motherrrr!” I’d call my parents: “How ya doing? Good. Fine. Fine. Okay. Fine. Love ya.” I was a bad actor. I plodded along, forcing myself to go through the motions, trying to be the same old me everyone knew. But I was counting the hours until I could get back into bed and pull the covers up over my head. Sleep was my only relief.

It wasn’t until later that I’d be able to put a name on what I was experiencing: depression. It’s a clinical condition that afflicts thirtyfour million Americans at some time in their lives, which means that there were—and are—a hell of a lot of others out there feeling painfully empty and lifeless, just like me. But it took me more than a year to reach that realization. In the meantime, I didn’t know what was wrong with me, and I definitely didn’t know what to do about it.

Many people think depression is a big, dramatic black hole that swallows you up. But it doesn’t have to be. It’s not necessarily finding yourself thinking about suicide, which I never did, even on my worst days. It’s something much worse, if you ask me. I’m an actress, so drama I can do. But this was the antithesis of drama. It was as though I were floating in a great thick bog of stillness, and it was that dullness I couldn’t stand. The damping down of all my feelings. The absolute, complete joylessness.

Joyless or not, I knew it was extremely important to keep up appearances, so I wasted a lot of energy that I didn’t really have pretending to have a sunny disposition, pasting a big, fat fake smile on my face. I had to show the world that I was okay and could be trusted. I had to prove that I could work, raise my kids, run my household, appear at charity benefits—do all the things I’d always done. At the time, I thought the worst thing in the world would be if anyone discovered how I was feeling. I mean anyone. No one could know—not my mother, not my sister, Lizzie, not my friends, or the people I worked with. So I hid in my house. I avoided talking to my friends. If anyone mentioned that I looked beat, I’d say, “Yeah, I’m tired. It’s been a rough year.” Everyone pretty much took me at face value and let me off the hook. People don’t want to know, they really don’t. Not because they don’t care, but because they don’t know what to do. Basically, they’re afraid.

Hiding my feelings was really just a symptom of my disease. The shame you feel when you’re depressed is phenomenal. You think you’re weak, and nobody wants to seem weak. Nobody wants to look mental, especially in show business. As it is, if you’re a fortytwo- year-old woman, you’re hanging on by a thread most of the time anyway. If there ’s a difficulty, a problem, you can just forget it. God forbid a rumor should start. A few juicy tabloid mentions and you’re toast. It’s no wonder it takes so long for people to get help.

My daughter Stella was ten then, full of energy and spirit. She’d come bouncing in the door from school, calling to me, “Mommy, Mommy,” talking a mile a minute about her day, sharing every exciting and mundane thing that had happened since that morning. I’d put a smile on my face while listening with only half an ear and thinking about sleep. That definitely wasn’t me. I adored this little girl, and normally I hung on every word out of her mouth. It was all part of a vicious cycle. The worse I felt, the less I cared, and the less I cared, the worse I felt.

Stella mostly bought my act, but my sixteen-year-old daughter Margaux wasn’t so easily fooled. She saw right through me, with that terrifying teenage acuity of hers. “What’s the deal with you?” she’d ask, staring at me hard. I didn’t know, so I just said, “Nothing. On the Couch • 7 Everything’s fine.” Margaux would roll her eyes, letting me know she didn’t believe it for a minute. “Okay. Everything’s fine,” she ’d say, parroting me sarcastically.

Even the animals had my number. The dogs would watch me morosely, their eyes seemingly reflecting my depression, their normally high spirits dampened by my mood. My plump, normally affectionate cat would push himself up and lumber out of the room when he saw me coming. “No way am I dealing with her crap,” his disappearing tail seemed to signal.

My deepest fear was that I had permanently messed up my life. You see, although I can say I didn’t exactly know what was wrong with me, I suspected plenty. Depression didn’t just arrive out of the blue. It followed several years of a downhill slide, most of which was self-imposed.

In 1990, I’d been at the top of my game. I was nominated for an Academy Award for my performance in Goodfellas, and I felt as if nothing could touch me. In a business where your self-esteem is always on the line, it’s impossible to describe the overwhelming relief of being successful, even if that success is fleeting. Being considered for an Academy Award is a powerful rush of affirmation in a very crazy, quixotic business.

But I had a secret that I kept well hidden behind my glittering smile. As my career became more satisfying, my personal life was failing. More than anything, I wanted a sense of loving calm at home, but this dream was shattered. It was such a wild juxtaposition: in the eyes of the world I was a movie star, and I’d have to stop a minute and think, Holy shit. They’re paying me to do something that I love. But I’d get home and it was nothing but catastrophe. At this point, I’d been living with Harvey Keitel for eight years, and we were as good as married. We had the girls—my daughter Margaux, from my previous marriage, and our daughter Stella—and we’d just bought a beautiful house overlooking the Hudson River in Sneden’s Landing, an exclusive enclave north of New York City.

But it wasn’t all tea and roses. I wondered if Harvey had the capacity for contentment. He seemed to be filled with rage—at the world, at his parents, at the industry, and at me. Some people would say it was this rage that made him such a compelling presence on the screen. Well, fine. He ’s a brilliant, riveting, intense actor. But we were living with it every single day. When Harvey was home, the girls and I just wanted to stay out of the way. We tiptoed around, walking on eggshells. But a lot of the time he wasn’t home. And there were times, sometimes days on end, when I didn’t know where the hell he was.

For a long time, I covered it up. I was really good at acting like nothing was wrong. I’d answer the phone and say cheerfully, “Harvey’s not here at the moment,” as if he’d just stepped out for a breath of fresh air, when the truth was I hadn’t seen him in four days. He had a drug problem; I knew that. But he ’d promised me over and over that he was dealing with it. I’d finally stopped believing him, and I realized that the pretense couldn’t go on forever. Instead, I started to hate him for what he was putting us through. I took it personally. I felt betrayed.

I was lonely and heartbroken, and I wasn’t exactly thinking straight.

So I did something extremely stupid. In the summer of 1990, I had a fling with Edward James Olmos while we were on location in Idaho filming A Talent for the Game. I wasn’t trying to destroy my relationship with Harvey, but I was hungry for another kind of love, something that was simpler and less intense. I think I just wanted to be coddled a little bit. It was a purely selfish act, for which I was deeply sorry. What I didn’t count on was Harvey finding out. I believed he was incapable of seeing his own behavior with any kind of clarity, but he was like a laser beam when it came to my faults. I knew he would never forgive me, and his fury was absolutely terrifying. I finally asked him to leave. Harvey moved back to our loft in lower Manhattan, and I stayed in Sneden’s Landing with the girls. But then I compounded the problem by marrying Eddie in 1994, thinking it would be best for everybody because he would bring stability to our lives.

All of my choices during that period were driven by a ferocious desire to stand up for myself and to fight for my dignity. I had a right not to be belittled and pushed around and controlled, and I was finally grabbing for it. I was scraping and clawing to get away from Harvey’s hold, his ability to pull me up and make me feel like somebody one minute and like nothing the next. But Harvey seemed determined to punish me and to impose his will on me. There were ugly charges leveled against Eddie, which opened up a nightmare for all of us, as well as the endless custody battle over Stella that nearly bankrupted me. And in the midst of everything, Stella became des- perately ill with systemic juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease that left her screaming in pain.

It was one thing after another, one terrible stress after another piling up and bringing me down. During those long, difficult years, I repeatedly made withdrawals from my emotional account, until I was finally cleaned out. We all came away damaged—my kids, Harvey, Eddie, his kids, me—and everyone suffered.

It’s hard to describe the level of shame I felt, and I truly believed that I had caused this misery. That sense of shame is also a sign of the disease. You know you’re suffering from depression when you define your life by your failures instead of your successes. I felt I was to blame for everything. Who was I? Well, I was a woman in my forties who had made a big mess of her life. I’d sit on the deck of my beautiful house in Sneden’s Landing, which I was on the verge of losing, and look out on the expanse of the Hudson River, brooding over my shortcomings and mistakes.

How could I call myself a good parent to my daughters, who meant more to me than anyone in the world? Was I even worthy of being a mother? What if I lost the house? What if I couldn’t take care of my family? There was no easy solution in sight. The bank wanted to foreclose, the lawyers wanted to be paid, and there was no real work coming in. It was, in a word, tough.

So, if I felt down, I figured I had good reason. But I’m not the kind of person who sits around going, “Oh, woe is me,” so I figured I’d snap out of it. I started every day out determined to get my ass in gear, but I’d invariably stall by midmorning. Then the first call from my lawyer would send me straight back into my gloom. That’s the thing about depression: It’s internal. It’s just there. It’s not rational, it’s not logical, and it doesn’t go away when you tell it to.

The scary thing is, I was functioning well enough that I could have gone on for years, just getting by, just existing, with no joy or happiness in my life. And I was afraid that’s exactly what would happen.

Finally, my old friend John Hoving, who happens to be a social worker, said to me, “You need to go to a doctor, and you need to get on an antidepressant.” John had known me for twenty years, and he saw right through me.

“Oh, right,” I said sarcastically. “That’s all I need. Then I can add ‘crazy’ to my credits. It’s hard enough for an actress my age to get work. Being a known mental case is not going to improve my chances.” To my way of thinking, taking antidepressants was a big stigma that I would never be able to overcome. I was also worried that if I took medication, I’d stop being myself—not that “myself ” was so terrific at that point. But I had terrifying ideas of what medication would do to me. I worried that I’d be a zombie, and I wouldn’t be able to act. I’d never feel again.

John knew me well enough to back off a little. “Okay, but see a therapist. Really, it will help.”

I scoffed at that, too. “What the hell is a shrink going to tell me that I don’t already know?”

I kept plodding along. And nothing happened. I mean, nothing. No real work, no nothing. Fortunately, Heather was still bugging me about the Mafia show. So I finally sat down and read the damned script.

One night, when Stella was at Harvey’s and Margaux was out with friends, I got a fire going in the fireplace, curled up on the couch under a blanket, and entered the world of the Soprano family. The script was David Chase’s dark vision of the life of Tony Soprano, a second-generation mobster who lived with his wife and two children in an upscale North Jersey home, a tough guy on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The story opened with Tony suffering a panic attack so severe it sent him to a psychiatrist. The setup was immediately intriguing. On the one hand, Tony has life-or-death power over people. On the other, he ’s been abused by his mother, he can’t satisfy his wife, and his children treat him with indifference or contempt. He’s a wiseguy with a midlife crisis.

The script was funny and brutal and touching, all at once. It was an amazing work of emotional manipulation, the way it could make you feel sorry for Tony one minute and repulsed by him the next. All of the characters were very strongly defined and completely three-dimensional. It was a great piece of writing.

The part of Tony’s wife, Carmela, was highlighted on my copy of the script. David had first seen me in Goodfellas, and he was taken with my portrayal of mobster Henry Hill’s wife, Karen. He thought of me when he was casting for Carmela. This was a juicy role. Carmela Soprano was a complex character, a woman trying to balance the violence in her husband’s world with her desire to be seen as a respectable upper-class lady and a typical suburban mom. But she knew who she was, and she knew who Tony was, too. She was tough and real, and I totally got her. I’d done a lot of research in preparation for my role as Karen Hill, and I’d learned all about women who made this particular deal with the devil. I knew I could play Carmela, but I didn’t really want to. Here ’s the thing. I’d already played the mob wife—in a big way. Been there, done that. And while I was reading David’s script, I was completely taken with the character of Tony’s psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi.

Dr. Melfi was calling out to me. I identified with this woman. I could feel her. I knew her. Although the role was less substantial than that of Carmela, Melfi’s place in the drama was absolutely central. I recognized Melfi as the moral through-line of The Sopranos. She was the voice of conscience and hope. I mean, what psychiatrist in her right mind would treat a gangster? She was going to help a killer feel better about himself? Melfi seemed to view the challenge as far greater than that. She wanted to believe that no matter how low a person sank, how devoid of common morality he seemed, she could help him change. I loved that about her.

I also found myself identifying with Dr. Melfi on a more personal basis. She was a flawed, lonely woman who questioned her own life. She battled private demons of her own. She drank too much. She was a failure at marriage. She and her son didn’t get along. Privately, she suffered deep doubts, just like me. She was a woman who had sacrificed everything for her work and her desire to heal others’ torments, and who ended up being tormented herself. She hadn’t expected to be so sad at this point in her life, but she battled on. She tried to be straight with herself—to do the right thing. I saw Melfi holding out the hand of redemption to Tony Soprano, even as she searched for it in herself. A chill went up my spine. I was meant to play Dr. Melfi.

I called Heather first thing the next morning. “I read the script,” I said.

“Thank God!”

“The thing is, I don’t want to play the part of Carmela. I want to play Dr. Melfi.”

There was silence on the other end of the line. Then, Heather slowly said, “Don’t do this to me again, Lorraine.”

I knew what she was talking about. In 1992, I had a chance to star in a big-budget movie called Fearless. It was an incredible opportunity to work with the great director Peter Weir, who’d done The Year of Living Dangerously, Witness, and Dead Poets Society. I had always wanted to work with him. Plus, the movie starred Jeff Bridges. What could be bad? The plot involved a guy whose personality is changed after he survives an airplane crash. They wanted me to play his wife. But I didn’t like that role. I wanted to play the female survivor whose baby died in the crash. I stuck to my guns and ended up with nothing. The part of the wife went to Isabella Rossellini, and the part of the survivor went to Rosie Perez. I was right about it being a great role, though. Rosie Perez got nominated for an Oscar.

Poor Heather. I felt for her, I really did. She knew me better than anyone in the world, had been representing me and advising me since the beginning of my career. She’d talked me off ledges, fought for me, and put up with my crap. And now I imagined her sitting at her desk, running a replay of the Fearless debacle in her mind. “They’re not looking at you for Dr. Melfi,” she repeated. “For Carmela. Not Melfi.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the part I like.”

She sighed. “Do me a favor. Go in and talk to David Chase. You tell him.”

A few days later, I traded in my bathrobe for a decent-looking suit, Hush Puppies, and makeup. I even got my hair done. One thing they always say about me: I clean up good. By the time I arrived for my appointment, I looked like a professional actress.

David Chase was casting in a crummy little rent-a-room on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. I climbed five steep flights of stairs—the first exercise I’d had in months—and limped into the room.

David was sitting at a cluttered table, and he looked at me with dark, heavy-lidded eyes as I entered the room. My first impression of David was that he was a complicated man—soft-spoken but intense. As he held out a hand to greet me, our eyes locked in a moment of mutual understanding. We clicked on a deep level. I felt it right away.

I told him how much I loved his script, and then I dropped the bomb about wanting to play Dr. Melfi. He gave me a look I have since come to know so well, the one that says, Huh. What have we here? I explained that I felt I’d already played Carmela. But Melfi was different. “I love this woman,” I said. “Love her.”

“Huh.” It wasn’t really a response. It was more like an exhalation of air.

“I guess what I’m saying is, well, Dr. Melfi is what I want.”

He looked at me, and I looked back at him, and it was just like the point in the cartoon where the Roadrunner gets right up to the edge of the cliff and puts on the brakes—eeeeeeeeeeck. He ’s engulfed in huge clouds of dust. Waiting, waiting, waiting, the dust slowly clears . . .

“Okay,” David said.

I was elated. I could hear my heart pounding in my ears. Some creative artists won’t stand for people interfering with their vision, but I was fortunate. David was interested in what I had to say. And as we talked, something clicked for both of us.

For David, the core of The Sopranos was Tony’s relationship with his mother, which led to his panic attacks and ultimately to Dr. Melfi’s office. It was personal with David. For years he ’d been telling people stories about his own mother that would have them laughing hysterically at first, but ultimately leave them crying. They kept telling him, “You have to write about this.” And in a way, with The Sopranos, he finally did. David said that, as a child, he had repeatedly suffered injury at the hands of his mother. She never missed an opportunity to harp on him, calling him stupid and complaining about his bad behavior. She never failed to remind him that he was completely unlovable. He recalled that she once threatened to put his eye out with a fork because he was being too rambunctious. He was seven years old! As an adult, David sought the help of a therapist to explore some of the scars his mother had left on his psyche. His interest in the therapeutic process only deepened. So, in The Sopranos, he chose to model Tony’s cruel mother, Livia, somewhat after his own. He also wanted to explore a question that had occupied much of his time in therapy: Can your actions in life be understood—and even excused—if your psyche was warped by the sick behavior of a negative, guilt-inducing mother? What if you’re a cold-blooded murderer? A mobster? A psychopathic maniac?

David felt he ’d been helped by analytic therapy, but the process had also raised many questions for him, and in a sense The Sopranos was his attempt to work through and eventually answer them. David put Tony Soprano in a room with Dr. Melfi, hoping to discover whether even a guy like Tony could be saved. I wanted to embody the woman who tried to guide Tony toward redemption, and once David agreed to cast me, I became consumed with turning the character into flesh and blood.

We started filming the pilot in the spring of 1997. I was relieved to have a part that kept me close to home. When you’re an actor with kids, you rejoice to have a local job that allows you to maintain a family life. All of the exterior scenes were shot in North Jersey, an easy commute away. That’s another thing I admired about David. Despite the expense of shooting films in the New York area—the union take alone could kill you—he wasn’t willing to film in Canada, which was what so many others were doing at that point. A big believer in total authenticity, he knew a street in Toronto wasn’t going to look or feel like a street in Newark. And of course, the entire cast and crew loved him for it.

I made Dr. Melfi a Jungian therapist. Carl Jung believed that if people could get access to their unconscious minds, they’d find a treasure trove of important information that would help them solve their problems and live more satisfying lives. Most of the time people just skim the surface and take life at face value; they don’t stop to analyze why they repeat their mistakes, or why they behave in self-destructive ways. Didn’t I know it! In Tony Soprano’s case, it was a big stretch to think that analyzing his dreams or becoming aware of his childhood wounds would make him wake up and say, “Oh, my God, what was I thinking, whacking that guy?” Even so, the pilot episode was suspenseful—Tony had opened a door by entering therapy. Would he walk through it?

For me, getting inside Dr. Melfi meant becoming very still. Tony was the storyteller; his therapist was the listener and interpreter. David wanted the therapy sessions to be shot starkly, with no moving camera angles. It was just Tony and Melfi, sitting across from each other in a room. Not only were the therapy scenes a dramatic contrast to the emotional and violent tone of other scenes, they were also different from what television viewers were used to seeing. I told David that I wasn’t sure how people would react to the therapy sessions. “Either they’ll be the weak link or people will be fascinated,” I said. I had no idea which way it would go.

It was the first day of filming. Sitting very straight and composed in Dr. Melfi’s chair, I looked across at Jimmy Gandolfini, who perfectly embodied Tony Soprano’s tough but fragile pose. He was slumped in his chair, the big made man, embarrassed that he ’d had a panic attack and fainted. I worked Melfi’s face into a blank, open pose—polite but with a touch of intimacy. I relished that scene, where Tony tells Melfi about the depression he ’s been feeling ever since a family of ducks living in his swimming pool flew away. He loved those ducks. “I was sad to see them go,” he says, and to his great shame starts to cry. “That’s what I’m so full of dread about, that I’m going to lose my family, just like I lost the ducks. It’s always with me.”

What a riveting beginning! What a home run! We did great work on that pilot, and nobody doubted that HBO would pick it up. But then there was silence, not a single word from HBO for months. David sent me a copy of the pilot, and I couldn’t stop watching it. It was so amazing. But as time went by, I began to get that feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach. Oh, no. Don’t tell me they’re not going to pick up this show. It was a different feeling for me. I’d always done movies, where the deal was sealed before we started shooting. In television, you get paid for the pilot episode, and then you wait for it to be picked up. If it’s shelved, the payday is over. Even if it’s a go, they’ll maybe give you a dozen episodes. I hated the sense of always being on the chopping block.

As December approached, I was starting to get nervous. Our contracts were up on December 13. Finally, I called David. “What’s going on?” I bleated into the phone. “I have never seen anything so fuckin’ brilliant. I’m starving for more. Give me more!”

He was laughing. “Believe me, I’d like to give you more,”

he said. “So, what’s up?”

He sighed. “Chris Albrecht at HBO hasn’t okayed it yet. He thinks it’s too expensive.”

“What can I do?” I had visions of holding fund-raisers, bake sales, penny drives.

“Why don’t you call Chris Albrecht?” David said, half joking. “I will.” My next call was to HBO—as if Chris Albrecht would have an idea in hell who I was. But he came to the phone. I did a song and dance for him, and I think he was amused. Did it help?

Who knew?

“You called Chris Albrecht?” Heather asked in amazement when I told her.

“I did. Somebody had to talk sense into the guy.” My false bravado was obvious. I didn’t feel very confident.

“I just got a call,” Heather said. “HBO ordered twelve more episodes. We ’re in.”

I screamed and raised my arms to the heavens, Rocky-style. Finally, something good was coming my way.

Isuppose it would make a perfect story if I told you I completely transformed myself, became Dr. Melfi, rose out of my slump, and rode off into the sunset with the wind whipping my hair and the radio blasting “I am woman, hear me roar . . .”

Didn’t happen. All during 1998, as we shot the first season of The Sopranos—the best job I’d ever had—I struggled through that pea-soup gloom. Even as I was immersed in the role of Dr. Melfi— a therapist, for God’s sake—my depression was there in the background like a constant throbbing ache. It refused me the full measure of joy I deserved from this wonderful turn of events. My life was on the upswing, but my mood stayed on the downswing. That’s the bitch of depression. It gets a hold on you, and the longer you wait to confront it, the harder it is to climb out of it. That internal vise just clamps down tighter.

But, in addition to being frustrated, I was also curious. My low mood had been easy enough to explain when my life was a mess. Now that things were looking up, why couldn’t I respond? Why wasn’t I elated? Why wasn’t I out dancing in the streets? Why?

“Because you’re depressed,” John Hoving reminded me.

“Doctor Melfi, heal thyself! Get thee to a therapist.”

I continued to resist. Then one day, while flipping through a magazine, I stopped at an ad. It read: “You have only one chance to be a mother. Why do it depressed?”

Those words hit me like a ton of bricks. “All right already,” I said out loud. “I’m going.” I got a recommendation, and went to see Dr. Stein* the following week.

He was a lovely man. I felt it from the first moment: he wanted to help me. After he listened to me stumbling through an attempt at describing what I was experiencing, he said, “I’m going to put you on an antidepressant.”

Uh, oh, I thought, and then I giggled. I was reacting exactly like Tony Soprano when Melfi mentioned medication. “Here we go,” Tony had groused. “Here comes the Prozac.”

Actually, for me it was Zoloft. Dr. Stein explained that the medication wasn’t a happy pill. “It’s a tool,” he said. “It will lighten your load, and make it possible for us to do the work we need to do.”

I was reluctant. It was hard for me to accept the idea of taking a mind-altering medication. What if I couldn’t act anymore? What if I wasn’t me anymore? What if it changed my personality? I didn’t think I could stand that. I thought even depression would be better than waking up feeling like a different person. I was scared.

So I told Dr. Stein all my fears, and he was extremely understanding. He didn’t brush me off, and I appreciated that. He answered every concern, and then he said if Zoloft didn’t work, we ’d try another way. I relaxed once I saw that therapy wasn’t going to be a rigid routine. I left his office and went directly to the pharmacy. I realized it could be the beginning of the end of my problems.

So I began to take Zoloft, and it was weird. I didn’t feel anything. It wasn’t like a druggy drug. I wasn’t high, or groggy, or stoned. I was just myself. And within a couple of weeks, things just started to open up and get clearer. I felt lighter. The fog lifted. As I started to feel better, the first thing I wanted to do was clean the house. I had let so many things go. The chaos in my house represented the mess in my life. I was done with it.

I went through everything. Every drawer, every closet, every box. I had music playing loud, and I was singing along, cleaning out my soul. At one point, after I’d been at it for a few hours, I looked up to find a crowd in the doorway. Two kids, two Labs, a wire- haired terrier, and a large furry cat. Gaping (as much as dogs and a cat can gape). And I smiled my first truly genuine smile in a long time, and yelled out, “Everybody in the car. We ’re going to the Greek Village for dinner.”

I was back on track. The medication hadn’t “cured” me. But it gave me the jump start I needed. I was so grateful that I hadn’t let the fear of being thought crazy or weak, insufficient in some essential way, make me wait for help a single day longer. Life was always good—but enjoying life fully was even better.

When the cast and crew gathered for the premiere of The Sopranos on a cold January night in 1999, it wasn’t exactly a starstudded event. Although in later years the premieres would be held at the legendary Ziegfeld Theater, with eleven hundred seats jammed to the rafters, that first time we stuffed ourselves into a medium-size theater in the basement of the Virgin Megastore in Times Square, and there wasn’t a flashing bulb in sight. It was a family event in every way. The post-premiere reception was held at John’s Pizzeria.

I sat with Margaux and Stella on either side of me, and we all cheered wildly as the opening notes of “Woke Up This Morning” thrummed through the theater and Tony Soprano appeared on the screen, driving up to the tollbooth of the New Jersey Turnpike. As we watched, I kept reaching over to cover Stella’s eyes so she wouldn’t see the violence or the nude dancers at the strip club, Bada Bing. She had just turned thirteen, and I wasn’t about to expose her to that. Naturally, she was insulted at being treated like a child.

The Sopranos was a hit, and I was glowing with pride. I tell you, after the gloom and doom of the past few years, I was filled with awe that life—my life—had been so graciously restored to me. So I decided to do something daring. I changed therapists.

I honestly don’t know if it was Dr. Melfi’s influence or what. I just knew I wanted a woman’s voice, a woman’s perspective. Don’t get me wrong, Dr. Stein was a wonderful, compassionate man who got me through the crisis. But I also saw that the biggest issues in my life had to do with the way I’d let men get a hold on me. I’d never been in a completely healthy relationship. I’d never demanded equality. I wanted to make sure I changed that—better late than never. But in order to change it, I had to understand the part of me that made it happen. I thought I would feel safer exploring those areas with a woman therapist.

Dr. Stein was very understanding, going so far as to recommend someone. I’d been nervous about making a change, because I didn’t want to have to start over. But, looking back, I’d tell anyone who asked for my advice to go for it and not be afraid. In therapy, you grow, and what you need at one period of your life may not be what you need later.

When Dr. Melfi tells Tony Soprano, “Sad is good. Unconscious isn’t,” I really got it. People tamp themselves down and tune out their reality. They take the pain that they’re feeling out on themselves and others in a thousand different ways, wallowing in guilt and blame. It’s such a waste. I’d never thought of myself as being unconscious, but in therapy, I was forced to admit that I wasn’t always so willing to turn on the floodlights of my consciousness and really take a look deep inside, poke around and peer into all of the corners, every nook and cranny. I thought I was depressed because I’d had some hard knocks, but my new therapist, Dr. Sullivan*, kept pushing me to search more deeply. I felt comfortable with her. She was middle-aged, like me, and the woman-to-woman thing worked for me. She got me.

I’ll admit I had a little fun with her. The Sopranos was a big hit by then. I knew she knew who I was. There ’s no way she didn’t realize she was treating Dr. Melfi. But I never brought it up, not once, the whole time. To tell you the truth, she was probably relieved. What therapist wants to compete with Dr. Melfi in her own office?

Depression is a process, and treatment for depression is a process. It doesn’t happen overnight, and it doesn’t take a straight and certain path. There are weeks when you meet with your therapist and report that you’re starting to feel better, and other times when you don’t feel so great—maybe even worse than when you started. It takes time, and a degree of patience with yourself. In some ways, it’s like being overweight. You might start a diet, but that doesn’t mean that suddenly you won’t want to eat things that you shouldn’t. It doesn’t mean you’re going to lose the weight overnight. It took a long time to gain the weight, and takes a long time to lose it. Depression is the same thing—it takes time to start to feel better. It’s a long path.

“I don’t get it,” I said in one of my therapy sessions. “How can an optimist like me be depressed?”

“Maybe you’re not an optimist,” Dr. Sullivan said.

I didn’t like that. “Usually, I am,” I told her. “I’ve always been.”

“You’ve been unhappy for a long time,” she observed.

That stopped me. I had been unhappy for a long time. Damn. I realized it was true. My therapist was right.

I think we all have areas of our lives we ’d just as soon leave unexamined. Those “God knows what I was thinking” moments. Those “Let’s just pretend this never happened” moments. I was especially good at that. When I was growing up, my mother’s attitude was, if you didn’t talk about it, it never happened. There was no point in dwelling on past mistakes. I’d taken that lesson to heart. To me, being a survivor meant moving on. Dr. Sullivan taught me that you don’t have to live in the past to understand how it shapes you.

I came to see that my failed relationships were part of a larger puzzle. It wasn’t accidental that I was drawn to exciting, intense men who turned out to be emotionally troubled and unavailable. What I saw as their power was really weakness, and I allowed the weakness to control me. I realized that, too often in my life, I had made decisions because one man or another, who seemed to know better than I did, told me it was what I should do. It was time for me to start setting my own course. First, I had to own up to the ways I’d damaged myself and those I loved. It was grueling work.

One day I said to Dr. Sullivan, joking, but not really, “I thought I was depressed before . . .”

She smiled. “This is what consciousness feels like. It’s painful at first, but this isn’t a wasted period. Use the time in which you finally understand you’re depressed as an inward voyage. Don’t grab for all the exterior fixes that won’t feed your soul.” That concept resonated with me. I found the idea of an inward voyage, a chance at true discovery, exciting. I began to think about what kind of person I wanted to be. What kind of mother. What kind of woman. What kind of human being.

I started hanging out at the local Barnes & Noble, setting up in the self-help section. I’d sit on the floor and immerse myself in books about self-empowerment, the spiritual journey, being a woman, finding your strength. I was such a regular that the staff began to notice me. They probably thought I was doing research for my role as Dr. Melfi. One day a young man brought a chair over. “Ms. Bracco, maybe you’d be more comfortable sitting,” he said. I gave him a bright smile, said thank you, and sat down. I didn’t budge for two hours.

I put myself on the couch. I know people think that there are some things that are just too painful to talk about. I know I thought that. But once you begin traveling down the road of selfexamination, you have to go all the way and ultimately take responsibility for everything, good and bad. It’s like waking up just before dawn and watching the day begin. Sunrise is a glorious time, the world coming awake again after a long dark night, the sun breaking over the horizon and coloring the sky red and purple and blue and taupe.

Sunrise was exactly what I was seeing, exactly what I was feeling. I’d been telling myself, You made your bed, now lie in it, and I was finally recognizing myself again, seeing my old feistiness kicking back in. Now I heard myself saying, Hell, no. I’m not lying in this bed. I’m getting up. I’m walking out the door. I’m outta here!

One day, about a year and a half after I started therapy, I said to Dr. Sullivan, “I don’t think I need the medication anymore. I’m really doing well. I lost myself for a little while, you know? I did; I lost myself. But I’m finding myself, and I want to stop taking the Zoloft.”

“Good,” she said. “We ’ll gradually wean you off the medication. But keep talking. Keep asking. Keep seeing.”

Today, when I walk down the street, fans will call out, “Hey, Dr. Melfi.” At parties people want to get me in a corner and tell me all their problems. That makes me laugh. I’ll kid them, saying, “My practice is very busy right now. Why don’t you call Doctor Phil.” But seriously, folks . . . I have to remind them, “You know, I’m not really a psychiatrist. I just play one on TV.”

What I am is a woman who is not that different from most women. Our culture glorifies people who are on television or in movies, but being a celebrity doesn’t insulate you from the struggles of life. I’m here to tell you that no one gets an exemption. In fact, sometimes it’s harder, especially if you’ve bought into your own P.R. I’ll tell you, when you take the makeup off and look in the mirror, you don’t see some airbrushed image looking back at you. My mirror these days shows a fifty-one-year-old face that’s seen better days. But I like to think that what’s inside has never been better. I am more alive today than I was at twenty-one. That’s a fact.

I always say that Dr. Melfi is my payback for depression. But maybe the best thing she ’s done for me is to provide a way to reach out to other people. And so, I’m inviting you onto my couch, to a safe place where the truth will be told. I’ll show you how I got lost, and maybe you’ll see something of yourself in me. I’ll show you how I got found, and my story might give you the courage to search for your own joy.

As I said, I’m no Dr. Melfi, but I do believe her with all my heart when she says, “Hope comes in many forms.”

"...entertainingly candid..."
—Quill and Quire