This Is Me: A Reckoning by Hayden Panettiere, narrated by the author, explores the life of a young actor who experienced success partly because her stage mother introduced her to acting and pushed her to be the best she could be in every audition. Despite her career success, home life shaped her perspective on herself, and without outside approval she was unhappy. Disappointing her mother or anyone’s expectations of her ruled her every move, smile, action, and choice.
Panettiere explores the heavy burdens she’s carried as a child star and as the breadwinner in her family, the breakup of her nuclear family, the death of her younger brother, and the decision to give up custody of her daughter as she dealt with post-partum depression. Her relationships were deeply felt and she lost all sense of her self in many of them, particularly her romantic relationships.
Her deep emotional connection and need for connection drove many of her decisions, but she also failed to see that she had no boundaries. That was until she informed her mother that she could just be her mother and no longer her manager. Like many artists, emotions are sometimes hard to see through for the obsessions they become, until damage is done to the self.
In much of this memoir, she’s rehashing the good and bad moments, but even as she’s recounting some moments, the self-examination I would expect in a memoir is minimal until the end of the book. It’s clear that she was not fully on the other side of the darkest moments in her life. The reckoning this title promises is unfilled.
The saddest part of This Is Me: A Reckoning by Hayden Panettiere is that the author is no longer here even as she sought to reclaim herself after a series of “lifequakes,” moments that “fractured her sense of self and forced her to rebuild it from the inside out.” Her story will be forever unfinished.
RATING: Quatrain
