Minka Kelly Reveals She Forgave Her Cancer-Stricken Mother On Her Deathbed

Minka Kelly is revealing her tough childhoodand teenage years with her stripper mom in an upcoming memoir, “Tell Me Everything.”

The actress is a far cry from living on the streets or going hungry now but that wasn’t the case when she was younger. Her now deceased mother and she had a rough relationship and experienced extreme poverty together.

“I spent a lot of my youth wishing my mom was something she wasn't, wishing she was like the other moms,” wrote Kelly in the book and repeats to People magazine in an interview this week. “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.”

She recounts her childhood as “traumatic” and scarring as she watched her mom do whatever she could to provide for her as a single mom. Her mom who was named Maureen battled drug dependency and domestic abuse.

‘Mo’ passed away in 2008 after fighting colon cancer. While Kelly watched cancer take her mother she slowly began to soften to her and build a tighter relationship.

Kelly reveals that the book is very candid, and she doesn’t hold back on detailing some of the bigger moments in her life like her mom’s passing. She initially learned of her mom’s cancer and went to confront her about her upsetting upbringing with the encouragement of her therapist.

Before that, Kelly hadn’t spoken to her mom in some time her plan backfired when she saw her mom and the confrontation didn’t pan out that way.  “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.”

She quickly moved on to a move-loving place. “I only need to forgive her and love her. She's already broken. What is the point of pouring salt on the wound? I'm fine. I just want to take care of her right now.”

Ahead of her mom falling ill to the point of no return, she invited her estranged daughter for Thanksgiving but Kelly chose to decline, a decision she still thinks about to this day. “That was her favorite holiday, and she really wanted me to be there,” she remembers opting to work instead.

“I just was like, ‘Ah, I'll see you for the next one,’ knowing deep down there wasn't going to be another. And I think about that a lot. That still breaks my heart.” She admits that while her childhood was rough it instill resilience in her.

There were fun moments like, “If she made a lot of money that night, we'd go grocery shopping at 2 a.m.” Kelly was often at work with her mom at the club Crazy Girls. “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.”