How Roseanne regained her sanity

Roseanne Barr is returning from exile, said Kate Aurthur in Newsweek. The brash ex-queen of sitcom television, now 58, dropped out of sight about a decade ago, following a mounting series of personal and professional setbacks, capped by a disastrous attempt at a reality show in 2003. Barr claims that the show’s creators “hired actors to be the producers, and they were told to really go out of their way to piss me off and see me explode.” So she quit the show. And then she dropped out.

She moved to the L.A. suburb El Segundo with her young son, Buck, who’d wondered what it would be like to have a “real” mom. “So I showed him,” she says. “I was like, ‘I don’t give a f---. I’m going to move to a regular neighborhood. I’m going to drive a regular car. I’m going to go to Ralphs [supermarket].’” But her fame upset that plan. People “were looking at me as if they were watching TV. They’d go, ‘Are you Roseanne?’ I’d say, ‘I used to be.’”

Deciding she needed deeper cover, she moved to Hawaii’s Big Island in 2007. “I feel like a human being there,” she says. Now she’s giving reality TV another chance with a new show that, she says, will reveal her as a better person and a better mother. “The best thing to me is when people at Buck’s school say, ‘You know, your son is so wonderful.’ That’s a big victory for me.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up