Sweetin said she convinced her worried parents (her mother, also an addict, put her up for adoption when she was 9 months old, and she was raised by an uncle and his wife her father was killed in a prison riot) to let her live on campus-which ultimately led to a 0.9 GPA her first semester. 'I lost that ability at around 20, and I had no idea how to balance anything, but when I was 5, I was great at it.' 'From a very early age, I learned to balance work, life and responsibilities,' she told an audience of Chapman students on a visit to the school this past March, per the university paper, The Panther.

Her career for the most part on hold, she was in and out of 12-step programs and rehab throughout her late teens and 20s while battling drug and alcohol abuse. She graduated from college in 2005.īut starting to drink when she was a young teen had set her on a destructive course. She only had two acting credits for the rest of the '90s, on the Joey- Matt-and- Andrew Lawrence sitcom Brotherly Love and on Party of Five, but Sweetin had gone back to school in the meantime, graduating from Los Alamitos High School in 1999 and enrolling at Chapman University in Orange, Calif. But that set the pattern of the kind of drinking that I would do.' 'That first drink gave me the self-confidence I had been searching for my whole life. 'I probably had two bottles of wine, and I was only 14,' she wrote in her 2009 memoir unSweetined, recalling the night of Candace Cameron's wedding, when she married Valeri Bure. (Mary-Kate Olsen would later have health troubles that required treatment, but she and Ashley were only 8 in 1995.) While she didn't fall out, or even lose touch, with her Full House family, Sweetin was the one who seemed to have the most trouble readjusting to regular life in those first years after the show ended.

Jodie sweetin memoir