I smiled. There it was: my life was going to change in Prague. She went on to say that I would meet a little man who would become important to me and that the true meaning of my life would be revealed. This, too, sounded fine. In fact, this whole visit was turning out to be much better than the last psychic I’d seen, who informed me that in my past life I’d been held captive by my own father and locked in a cement tomb in the woods, where I was burned alive, unknown by anyone.

I was going to Prague to shoot the movie Hellboy, in which I’d been cast as Liz Sherman, a pyro-telekinetic who, in a rage, accidentally burned her family to death and now must learn to control her powers. The director, Guillermo del Toro, had seen me in an indie film called Storytelling and thought my face held great loss. Loss was at the pit of Liz, he said. She couldn’t touch anyone. Any feeling made her burn. It was a fitting role for me because, for years of my life beginning in my twenties, I often had the sensation that my arms were on fire. The feeling would come and go inexplicably: a tingle all the way down to my fingertips like tiny electric shocks, then a burning so intense I felt I might combust, then gone. Though it nagged at me, I never said anything about this to anyone, not even my mother. It was just one more mystery about my body that I didn’t understand.

Mean Baby by Selma Blair (Virago, £18.99) is out now.
Images: publisher and Selma Blair

Selma Blair on the search for herself: “My mind was a void, and I wanted someone to fill it”