Melissa Gilbert on finding a new, simpler lifestyle during the pandemic and how 'Little House on the Prairie' helped prepare her for it

Melissa Gilbert tells us about her new book, Back to the Prairie: A Home Remade, A Life Rediscovered, in which she talks about leaving Hollywood and Botox behind, fixing up an old cabin and raising chickens during the pandemic.

She also talks about how her time on Little House on the Prairie helped prepare her for her new, simpler lifestyle and why hearing from fans about how much they love the show never gets old.

Video Transcript

MELISSA GILBERT: I never want people to feel like they're the only ones to experience anything. Someone's already experienced it before. Someone will experience later. We are never truly a hundred percent alone.

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I am Melissa Gilbert and I am so excited to share my new book, "Back to the Prairie, a Home Remade, a Life Rediscovered" on under the covers. There were a myriad of reasons why I chose to write this book. It's autobiographical and it covers pretty much the last 12 years of my life. But really, the focus has been on the last 2 and 1/2 to three years.

I wanted to celebrate some of the incredible stuff that I discovered. And the biggest lesson of all is that there's a huge difference between want and need. When life becomes about toilet paper, suddenly manicures don't matter, fancy parties don't matter, and driving the right car doesn't matter.

And literally, nothing matters except for survival and the survival of your loved ones. I wanted to share that idea with people too, and also give people a reminder of where we were, because we will go through other things like this.

I grew up in the entertainment industry from infancy. My family are our Hollywood Royalty, multi-generational performers, and my sister and my brother and I followed in those footsteps. There was a great deal of pressure and there still remains a great deal of pressure in this industry on the external, on how we look, on staying young especially and staying thin.

I had reached a point in my life where I really was rebelling against that. When I met my husband Tim Busfield, he was living in Michigan, we fell in love. And he said, listen, I have good news and bad news. The good news is I'm crazy about you, but the bad news is I live in Michigan. And that was the perfect moment for me to say, please get me out of here.

So I got to spend five years in Michigan and really allow myself the chance to stop fighting aging, stop with fillers and Botox, and all of that stuff, and stop coloring my hair even and just be.

When we found our home in the Catskills, we were on a very, very strict budget. The place that we found ultimately and fell in love with required a lot more work than I thought it would. I knew it didn't have any heat. We knew the plumbing was questionable, that we would have to do all this stuff.

It was when we walked inside that I realized, oh my gosh, there were books and toys, and rotting deer heads on the walls, and too much furniture, and beer stains everywhere. But the house was ready for us to be in it.

Around Thanksgiving Christmas of 2019, what no one knew was coming was the lockdown of March, that started March 13, 2020. We'd always have this fantasy of having a garden and having chickens, but sort of never really thought we'd do it, but we're looking at. At that time, we were looking at the food supply chain. And our local grocery store, they would stock up on-- the trucks would come on a Wednesday morning and it would be all sold out by Friday.

So we looked at each other and said, we really need to find a way to be someone independent, so we decided to go ahead and do the garden and get chickens. And we have an absolute blast. And that's a lot of what I write about in this book about the DIY aspect of it, and just being the joy that I felt that summer and have felt summer since doing these projects. Just being out and being sticky with sunscreen and bug spray and dirt under my fingernails.

And I actually feel like "Little House on the Prairie" was sort of the bait that kind of got opened my eyes to what could be. I would be on the set, especially when we were outdoors with the chickens, and then the frogs in the pond, and the horses and cows, and everybody had their dogs with them. And there were a lot of other kids to play with.

But I was outside in Simi Valley on the ranch, and always dusty, always dirty, but just gleeful and happy. From 9 to 19, when we were shooting "Little House on the Prairie," I had that outdoor life. So that was boiling in me this whole time. It was just a question of finding a way to have it.

I have to say with 100% conviction that one of the greatest gifts of my life was being cast on "Little House on the Prairie." I got to grow up on a set with an incredible cast and crew. Everyone there is like a second family to me. I absolutely love that people love "Little House on the Prairie" and I feel so honored to be a part of something that makes people feel. And I have people that come up to me all the time and burst into tears talking about "Little House on the Prairie."

And it never becomes trite. It never becomes old. It is a joy to be a part of something that beloved and to be beloved because of it.

I hope that people read this book and come away knowing that even though we were apart, we really weren't all that far apart. I don't know that this would have been my life at any other time. I know that I craved this existence, but I think it actually took having to stop to find it, having to stop absolutely everything. I found a stillness that I had never known before and had really relished.

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