Hayden Panettiere spent years in the public eye as one of Hollywood's most visible young stars, but a new memoir details how much she was keeping hidden during that time.
The book, This Is Me: A Reckoning, was released May 19 and climbed to number one on Amazon's biographies chart within hours of its release, according to Rolling Stone. It covers her career beginnings, her personal struggles, and what she describes as a series of experiences that fractured her sense of self and forced her to rebuild it from the inside out.
Panettiere began her career as a child actor on soap operas One Life to Live and Guiding Light before going on to larger roles in Heroes and Nashville, the latter earning her a Golden Globe nomination. While she was frequently praised publicly as a savvy next-generation star, she writes that her private experience was far more complicated. A difficult relationship with her mother, who also served as her manager, left her feeling more like a commodity than an artist, and she faced constant pressure around her weight and work ethic.
Her personal struggles deepened as she entered adulthood. Panettiere writes openly about addiction and domestic abuse. In 2014, she gave birth to a daughter, Kaya, with boxer Wladimir Klitschko. She quickly descended into severe postpartum depression, describing to the hosts of The View earlier this month a struggle with wanting to be a better mother to her daughter than her own mother had been to her, while being unable to get out of a funk that left her bedridden for days at a time.
In 2018, Panettiere relinquished full custody of Kaya to Klitschko amid her ongoing battles with addiction and postpartum depression. She writes in the book that, "Not being with her under the same roof [as Kaya] has been the most gut-wrenching experience of my life."
The memoir also addresses the death of her brother, Jansen, in 2023, along with what she refers to as rumored feuds with famous co-stars. She groups these events among the lifequakes she describes throughout the book. On her brother's death specifically, she writes that, "He would want me to remember that death and loss are part of life, but they allow rebirth if you let them."
Despite the weight of the material, Panettiere says she wants readers to come away with something hopeful, framing her experiences as evidence that recovery and rebuilding are possible. The book is available now.
