This Is Me: A Reckoning by Hayden Panettiere [Audiobook Review]

Hayden Panettiere spent her whole life having her story told by other people. She finally wrote it herself, and just as I was finishing her story, she was gone.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I’ve been watching Hayden Panettiere on screen for so long that she stopped feeling like an actress I recognized and started feeling like someone who had simply always been around. Remember the Titans. The early seasons of Heroes. A few years of Nashville, back when I still watched network TV on a schedule. Somewhere along the way I picked up vague pieces about health struggles and a rough stretch in her twenties. That was about the extent of what I knew.

So I expected the standard celebrity memoir: child stardom, a hard patch, a tidy redemption arc by the last chapter. This Is Me: A Reckoning did not give me that.

I also didn’t expect to be writing this review three weeks after Panettiere died. She was 36. She passed away on August 16, a little over three months after the book came out, and the cause of death is still under investigation. I don’t know how to review a memoir about survival without saying that up front, so I’m not going to try to write around it.

A Career That Started Before She Could Talk

Panettiere landed her first commercial before she was a year old. By age five, she’d been in more than fifty of them. By her early teens, she was the squeaky-clean face of a Neutrogena campaign and a fixture of early-2000s pop culture, with two Golden Globe nominations for Nashville waiting a decade down the line.

Most of us get to make our worst decisions in private. Panettiere made hers in front of a camera crew, and later, an entire internet.

Panettiere writes about being judged for her body, her relationships, her career choices, and pretty much every visible part of her life, all while she was still figuring out who she actually was. Fame gave her real opportunities, and she doesn’t pretend otherwise. But This Is Me is also a pretty clear reminder that fame doesn’t protect anyone.

Telling It Her Way, for Once

The idea running through This Is Me is simple. Panettiere has spent almost her whole life being watched, photographed, cast, and criticized by other people. This is the first time she gets to say what actually happened, in her own words.

The person who shows up is messier and more vulnerable than the polished image I remember. She writes about childhood fame, addiction, postpartum depression, an abusive relationship, motherhood, recovery, and the death of her younger brother, Jansen, who died suddenly in 2023. Some of it is genuinely hard to read, and that’s before you factor in what’s happened since.

The sections on addiction and recovery are some of the strongest in the book, mostly because Panettiere refuses to turn them into an inspirational speech. Her recovery is slow and never presented as finished.

She’s honest about the shame, the relapses, and the damage the addiction caused, both to her and to the people around her. She doesn’t try to excuse herself, and she’s also not interested in playing the victim. She’s just trying to explain how she got there.

Nothing in This Book Stays in Its Own Lane

Childhood fame becomes a lifelong identity problem, and public scrutiny curdles into shame. Trauma and addiction end up feeding each other, and postpartum depression piles on top of all of it. Then grief rearranges everything again after Jansen’s death.

Working out the connections between it all seems to be the real point of the book. What happens when you lose yourself in public, and what does it take to become recognizable to yourself again? That question interested me more than any of the behind-the-scenes Hollywood stories, though there are plenty of those too.

A Voice That Sounds Like Hers

I liked Panettiere’s voice on the page. It’s direct in a way that keeps the book from feeling manufactured. She’s funny in places you don’t expect, blunt about things most people would soften, and she’ll drop something awful into the middle of a paragraph without slowing down to cushion it.

The book reads like someone finally getting to say “here’s what actually happened to me,” instead of someone trying to rehabilitate an image.

Too Much Life, Not Enough Pages

My one real complaint is pacing. Panettiere has lived enough for several memoirs, and This Is Me sometimes tries to fit them all into one. Big, painful moments arrive, land hard, and then the book has to move on because there’s still so much ground left to cover. I wanted more time in the aftermath of some of these chapters, more room to sit with what had just happened before the next thing arrived.

It’s not a huge flaw, but given how heavy some of this material is, a little more room to breathe would have made an already strong book stronger.

I gave this book four out of five stars for exactly that reason. It’s a genuinely strong memoir that occasionally moves faster than its own material can support.

Rereading my notes after Panettiere’s death, though, the pacing reads differently. It’s hard not to wonder if she was somehow racing a clock she couldn’t see.

This Is Me was supposed to be about Panettiere finally getting to tell her own story after a lifetime of other people telling it for her. She got that. I just wish she’d had more time on the other side of it.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grand Central Publishing for an advanced reader’s copy. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.