Justine Bateman is so happy to not be famous

In the  early 1980s, fame looked a lot different than it did today.

“There wasn’t this general desire to become well known,” actress Justine Bateman says. “It was just something that happened to you and you dealt with it. It was like trying to keep the Coke in the bottle after you’d dropped the Mentos in.”

Bateman, who now mainly spends her time writing, producing and directing, once starred in the television show “Family Ties,” which ran from 1982 until 1989 on NBC. The sitcom — about a suburban family helmed by former 1960s radicals Elyse and Steven Keaton raising three kids in Reagan-era America — became one of the most-watched shows of the decade. And Bateman, who was just 16 when she started playing the endearingly ditsy middle child Mallory, spent her prime teenage and would-be college years growing up on television and in the spotlight. “It was unwieldy,” she says of the level of fame she reached at such a young age. 

“That gave me the experience to begin to write this book about fame and why we seek it and how out of control that seeking has become.”

Bateman talks about her book, “Fame: The Hijacking of Reality,” an unflinching look at what it’s like to be inside — and outside — that delicate bubble of fame.