From starring in Little House on the Prairie to moving to a little house in the mountains, Melissa Gilbert has done quite a 360 over the course of her life. In her new book, Back to the Prairie, Gilbert reflects on the pressure to change her appearance as she ages, what she’s learned from her three marriages, and how a shocking revelation about her father’s death prompted her to take action.

Gilbert was adopted as an infant. Her mother was a dancer and actress, and her father was an actor and comedian. “My family was probably really lucky to have adopted someone with the bloodline of a carny also,” Gilbert tells Katie during an interview for Next Question. “I like to think I landed in exactly the right place.” 

When she was ten years old, Gilbert was cast as Laura Ingalls Wilder on the hit show Little House on the Prairie. Although she loved acting, it also had its drawbacks. “Being a working child actor, there’s no time to be sick,” she explains. “There’s no time to have broken bones. I worked through all that stuff as a kid. So I was very good at the show must go on.”

Little House on the Prairie ended its almost ten-year run in 1983. As Gilbert got older and attempted to continue her acting career, she reluctantly gave into the pressure to change her appearance to look younger. “We’re in this profession where we stay as young as we can for as long as we can,” she tells Katie. “I went through surgeries, I [got] implants, I did Botox, I did fillers. I was starting to not look like myself…when it was all over, I was left thinking, who am I?”

Gilbert decided to stop chasing youth and to embrace aging naturally. “I’m not doing this anymore,” she tells Katie. “It’s too much work. I just want to be me. I want to be comfortable in my own skin.” Almost ten years ago, Gilbert had her breast implants removed, stopped the botox and fillers, and embraced natural aging.

As Gilbert got older, she began asking her mother more about her parents’ experiences when they were her age. Her father, a WWII veteran, passed away when she was only 11. Although Gilbert had believed her whole life that her father had died of a stroke, at age 45 her mother told her the truth: Her father died by suicide after receiving sub-par care at a VA hospital. As Gilbert struggled to understand the events that led to her father’s death, she began speaking out about veteran mental health. She tells Katie, “You hear about the tragedies at VA hospitals…but it did not really have a lot of weight for me until I realized my father is that statistic. It enabled me to talk to other people. I’m not alone in being the daughter of a veteran who died by suicide.” 

Gilbert now uses her fame to try to spread the word about a multitude of social issues, including the stigma many veterans still feel about seeking out mental health support. “It’s really important for people like me to continue to talk about these things, because the more we bring them out in the open, the less stigma there is, the less fear there is,” says Gilbert. “There’s nothing more powerful than finding a community, and knowing you’re not alone.”

To hear more of Katie’s conversation with Gilbert, including her decision to leave Hollywood and move to a rural home in the Catskills, make sure to listen to the newest episode of Next Question.