Candice Bergen’s new memoir goes into great detail about her life, holding back nothing even when it came time to reveal the personal struggle she suffered when her relationship with her child interfered with her marriage. She also talks about her time on the hit sitcom Murphy Brown, which went off the air in 1998 but remains a cult favorite for many.

Bergen says that she understood Brown’s role model status because she, too, wanted to actually be the character.

“People would credit me with Murphy Brown’s intelligence and wit, which were of course not mine. I envied Murphy’s supreme self-confidence. I loved that she’d been able to drink guys under the table…like many women at the time, I wanted to be Murphy Brown,” she writes.

In A Fine Romance, Bergen talks about how she fell so in love with her daughter, Chloe, that it eventually came between her and her husband, Louis Malle.

“In a sense, I’d betrayed him. I had fallen in love with someone else and it was head over heels,” Bergen said.

After suffering a devastating loss when Malle died from complications from a brain condition, Bergen said that she felt an unfamiliar rage and depression; until then, her life had been nearly fairy-tale perfect.

“It really costs you to take care of someone who’s critically ill day after day. You just want to escape. I was in a black anger. I think that I felt my life, which had always been blessed, had suddenly been hijacked by this completely other force,” she wrote.

The book ends on a positive note, however, as she recounts meeting and falling in love with real estate magnate Marshall Rose.