Key Points
Hayden Panettiere pulls back the curtain on her childhood, personal life, and career in her new book, This Is Me: A Reckoning.
“What really happened is generally more entertaining than anything that anyone could come up with,” she says, previewing the book to EW.
She also recalls getting emotional as she read stories about her late brother for the audiobook.
Hayden Panettiere is bracing herself for the reaction to her upcoming memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning.
“This was the first project where there was nobody there to direct me or give me real guidance,” the 36-year-old actress tells Entertainment Weekly.
“I just had to have a lot of trust in myself. I’m excited that the book’s done, but I’m also terrified all at the same time, which I think you’re supposed to feel when you’ve done something that you really put your heart and soul into,” she says.
Panettiere feels like the book, out May 19, is the first time her story is being told in her “own words.”
“I always hoped that I would write a book and I’d be able to share all my stories because truth is stranger than fiction. You couldn’t write the things that have happened in my life,” she explains.
“[But when] I got this opportunity, I was like, ‘Am I too young to do this?’ And then I thought through my life and I was like, ‘I might be young, but my life has been entertaining enough that I have plenty to share.’”
Hayden Panettiere: This is Me
“I’ve been in this industry for my entire life and there’ve been a lot of stories and preconceived ideas of who I am since I was about — that really started at 16 years old,” she continues. “I get to tell people the truth. I get to tell them what really happened, and what really happened is generally more entertaining than anything that anyone could come up with.”
This Is Me takes the reader through Panettiere’s childhood, including her parents’ rocky relationship and her venture into acting. (Panettiere and her mother are currently estranged.) After appearing in commercials, she began lengthy stints on soap operas One Life to Live and Guiding Light.
“I was 12 when I had my first identity crisis,” she tells EW. “And I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m going to do all these auditions, and I’m playing all these different roles, and they all feel genuine when I’m doing these scenes, and they feel like each character is a part of me, but who am I? Who am I outside of this acting world?’”
Panettiere would push herself to pull off emotional soap scenes, tapping into real-life trauma. She calls the method “trigger tears” and reveals that therapy helped her realize that the strategy was affecting her ability to process real life.
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“I didn’t realize that it was having the impact that it had on me until Nashville,” she says, referring to the six-season drama she began in 2012.
“I was crying and I was being emotional all the time,” she continues. “But because I was older, in order for me to get to those places mentally, I had to think of darker and darker things. And it took me longer and longer to get to those emotional places right before the scenes and then get out of those emotional places after the scenes. Whereas as a kid, I could just think my animals died and it was tears. It was much easier when I was a kid.”
As Nashville fans may know, Panettiere went through a series of ups and downs playing Juliette Barnes. The book pulls back the curtain on how dark things really got for Panettiere as she struggled with postpartum depression and substance abuse issues.
“Looking back on it now, I’m nothing but grateful for that show. I look back on it with an immense amount of pride — hindsight is 20/20,” she tells EW.
“The experience was intense at that moment, and I was really, truly invested in it. I was as invested as I’ve ever been in a character. I could also relate to her more than any other character that I’d played, except for maybe Sheryl Yoast at 10 [in Remember the Titans]. But now I look back at it, and I’m incredibly proud.”
While nothing was “easy” for Panettiere to write about — the book details her decision to sign over full custody of daughter Kaya to ex-fiancé Wladimir Klitschko in 2018 and her abusive relationship with ex Brian Hickerson — she says the hardest part of the process was writing about her brother, Jansen, who died in 2023 at age 28. Jansen battled his own substance abuse issues, with Panettiere pleading for him to get help after he confessed that he tried crack and heroin.
“I just finished the audiobook of it, and I couldn’t get through the end of the book and the things I say to Jansen,” she says. “I was completely choked up. That was really hard for me to say it out loud, to go through it. Until you read your words out loud, for whatever reason it doesn’t have the same emotional effect on you.”
She notes that the purpose of the book is to help others.
“I really hope that by reading about the trials and tribulations that I’ve gone through, that it can help [readers] overcome their own obstacles and make sure that they know that they’re not alone, because that’s the worst feeling in the world — especially when you’re going through a trying time — is to feel alone,” Panettiere says. “All you want to know is that somebody else has gone through and survived what you’re going through right now, and even though in the moment it feels like you’ll never be okay again. But I also hope people laugh through it as well. I think there’s a good balance.”
She concludes, “If I had told every single solitary story, the book would be five 300-page books.”
This Is Me: A Reckoning is out May 19.
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