This post deals with sensitive topics like addiction, eating disorders, suicide ideation, infertility, sexual harassment, and sexual abuse. Read with caution and take care of yourself ❤️.
1. In her memoir, The Woman in Me, Britney Spears recounted the painful experience of having an abortion after becoming pregnant with Justin Timberlake's baby. "It was important that no one find out about the pregnancy or the abortion, which meant doing everything at home," she wrote. "We didn't even tell my family. The only person who knew besides Justin and me was Felicia [Culotta, Britney's former assistant], who was always on hand to help me. I was told, 'It might hurt a little bit, but you'll be fine.'"
"On the appointed day, with only Felicia and Justin there, I took the little pills," she wrote. "Soon I started having excruciating cramps. I went into the bathroom and stayed there for hours, lying on the floor, sobbing and screaming."
2. In his memoir, If You Would Have Told Me, John Stamos recalled the moment he heard that his close friend and Full House costar, Bob Saget, had died. He explained that he'd seen reports but didn't believe them so he decided to text Bob. When Bob's wife Kelly Rizzo didn't answer at first either, he became worried. He wrote, "When I switch callers over to Kelly, all I hear is a wailing scream. I hit the ground in the parking lot and my knees slam down on the asphalt. 'Nooooooooooooooooooooo.'"
"My son is still sound asleep in the backseat of my car. I pull myself together to drive home and start making calls," he added. "First to Caitlin [McHugh Stamos, John's wife], she’s in disbelief. She calls her parents to come watch Billy. Then to Dave [Coulier]. 'Dave, Bob Saget is dead.' ... I call Lori [Loughlin], who's on the eighth hole of Lake View Country Club golfing with her husband [Massimo Giannulli]. 'Bob is dead, Lori.' She tells me later she dropped to her knees like me. Billy wakes up. 'Daddy?' I love you, son. ... I'm still not ready to accept that he's gone. Not sure I ever will be."
3. In her memoir, Hello Molly!, Molly Shannon told the gut-wrenching story of the car accident that killed her mother, cousin, and younger sister.
"The car was mangled badly on impact," she wrote. "A man passing the scene stopped. My mother was lying on the ground beside our car and she asked him, 'Where are my girls?... She wanted to gather her three little girls and she couldn't. Her heart must have broken in that moment. And those were her final words...My baby sister, Katie, and cousin Fran were killed instantly. Since Mary and I were in the very back of the station wagon, we just had a concussion and a broken arm, respectively. Katie was buried in the wreckage."
4. In his book, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, Matthew Perry shared that his relationship with alcohol began when he was just a teenager. "I had never been happier than in that moment," he wrote about the first time he drank.
He also shared that his substance abuse began after he hurt his neck in a jet-ski accident while filming Fools Rush In. An on-set doctor gave him Vicodin to relieve his pain. "As the pill kicked in, something clicked in me," he wrote. "And it’s been that click that I’ve been chasing the rest of my life."
5. In her memoir, Finding Me, Viola Davis shared her experience growing up in extreme poverty in Central Falls, Rhode Island. She explained, “We were ‘po.’ That’s a level lower than poor."
She added that food stamps were never enough to feed her family and that none of the toilets in their home worked — she became "very skilled at filling up a bucket and pouring it into the toilet to flush it." She said that they would also go "unwashed" and could never go into their kitchen because "the rats had taken over." The apartment building she lived in had even caught fire several times.
6. In his book, Spare, Prince Harry revealed that for years he had trouble grieving his mother Princess Diana's death and even believed that she'd faked the car crash and escaped.
Years later, when he finally came to terms with her passing, he asked a driver to replicate the route that Diana took that led to the crash. The drive didn't give him the closure he wanted and he called it “a very bad idea.”
7. In her memoir, Thicker Than Water, Kerry Washington opened up about her struggles with an eating disorder while she attended George Washington University in the '90s. "In many ways, that was one of the darkest times of my life," she wrote.
"Kerry in college was a hot mess... and bit of a wild child," she added. "But it's halfway through college that I started asking for help. In some ways I'm really grateful for Kerry in college because hitting bottom the way that she did, she opened the door for a lot more healing for me."
8. In her memoir, Tell Me Everything, Minka Kelly recalled the toxic relationship she had with her high school boyfriend, Rudy. At one point, he wanted to film a sex tape and she agreed, though when watching it back days later she "hardly even remembered making the tape" in the first place.
When Minka began to gain fame for her role on Friday Night Lights, Rudy allegedly tried to sell the video to the tabloids. Minka had to pay $50,000 to buy it back.
9. In his memoir, Pageboy, Elliot Page recounted the time at a party where a famous actor said he'd "fuck [Elliot] to make [him] realize [he wasn't] gay."
"I've had some version of that happen many times throughout my life," Elliot said in an interview with People. "A lot of queer and trans people deal with it incessantly. These moments that we often like don't talk about or we're supposed to just brush off, when actually it's very awful. I put that story in the book because it’s about highlighting the reality, the shit we deal with and what gets sent to us constantly, particularly in environments that are predominantly cis and heterosexual. How we navigate that world where you either have more extreme, overt moments like that. Or you have the more, like, subtle jokes. [In Hollywood] these are very powerful people. They're the ones choosing what stories are being told and creating content for people to see all around the world."
10. In her second book, You Got Anything Stronger?, Gabrielle Union shared the heartbreak she felt when she found out her partner Dwyane Wade was having a child with someone else, during the time she was dealing with her own fertility struggles.
"To say I was devastated is to pick a word on a low shelf for convenience, the experience of Dwyane having a baby so easily while I was unable to, left my soul not just broken into pieces, but shattered into fine dust scattering in the wind," she wrote.
11. In her memoir, Worthy, Jada Pinkett Smith shared that she had to start dealing drugs just so she could have money in her pocket. “Growing up, the drug dealers were the ones that had affluence. That’s what we readily saw as success," she wrote. "And so for me, considering my circumstances at the time, my mother was not doing well, she tried to get clean from heroin."
“I just wanted financial freedom," she continued. “What if something happens to my mother? What if she doesn't come home one night? Either overdosed, arrested, whatever. And so, I decided to sell drugs. I decided to sell crack cocaine.”
12. In his memoir, We Were Dreamers, Simu Liu opened up about the complicated relationship he had with his parents, who reportedly left him in China with his grandparents when they moved to Canada. Although he was reunited with his parents when he was four years old, Simu said that choice led to their strained relationship. He also shared details about the physical and emotional abuse he faced from both his mother and father.
“My parents have come a long way since the events of this chapter, and we all look back on this time with complicated feelings of guilt and remorse," he wrote. "Our hope is that families like ours will read our story and understand where we went wrong so that they can make a different choice, a choice to listen and to be kinder to one another."
13. In his book, Beyond the Wand: The Magic and Mayhem of Growing Up a Wizard, Tom Felton recounted the time his team held an intervention and suggested he go to rehab for his alcohol abuse. Then, while he was there he "escaped" less than 24 hours after checking in.
“All of a sudden, the frustration burst out of me,” he wrote. “I was, I realize now, completely sober for the first time in ages and I had an overwhelming sense of clarity and anger. I started screaming at God, at the sky, at everyone and no one, full of fury for what had happened to me, for the situation in which I found myself. I yelled, full-lung, at the sky and the ocean. I yelled until I’d let it all out, and I couldn’t yell anymore.”
14. In her memoir, Down the Drain, Julia Fox describes her whirlwind relationship with Kanye West, whom she refers to as "the artist." After they first met, she wrote that he sent over a selection of clothes for her to wear — all were variations of the same skintight black jumpsuit.
She added that later on, when she was trying on outfits for Kanye he told her, "I could get you a boob job if you want," but she refused. "His words stick to me like a piece of lint on my clothes. I can't shake off the uncomfortable feeling," she wrote.
15. In his memoir, Miss Memory Lane, Colton Haynes revealed that he almost lost his role on Teen Wolf after MTV found out he'd done a photo shoot for gay magazine, XY, as a teenager.
Before publicly coming out as gay in 2016, Colton was urged to stay silent about his sexuality. He even recalled an instance where a producer told him not to come out, or else he would lose jobs. He said, “It didn’t matter who was on my team, the message I got was always the same: ‘You will not work if you are yourself.’” However, Teen Wolf creator Jeff Davis fought to have Colton on the show.
16. In her memoir, The Princess Diarist, Carrie Fisher revealed that she had an affair with Harrison Ford while filming their first Star Wars movie in the '70s. At the time, she was 19 and he was 33, married with two kids.
She recalls the first time they slept together was after George Lucas’s 32nd birthday, in his studio car on their way back to London. She said, "A tug-of-war involving my wine-sodden virtue was underway, and I was unclear how it would turn out — but I realized who it was I wanted to win: my co-star, the one with the scar on his chin, the dialogue in his head and the gun in his belt — not now, just when in character, but still. After a mad scuffle, Mr. Ford threw my virtue and me into the back seat of his studio car and commanded the driver to 'Go! GO!' We went, followed by the crew."
She added that the affair went on for three months before she ended things and they "never again acknowledged that anything of that nature had occurred."
17. In her memoir, Making a Scene, Constance Wu opened up about a time in her 20s when she was raped by a man she'd been on a few dates with. She added that she "didn’t fight back because [she] didn’t want to make a scene."
She said she spent several years denying to herself that it ever happened and wrote that "hearing rape survivors’ stories didn’t seem to trigger me…it pissed me off in a way that I thought was activism." More than a decade later, Constance said she finally came to terms with what happened while on the plane coming back from filming Crazy Rich Asians in Singapore. "I was angry at myself for forgetting, angrier than I was at him for raping me," she wrote.
18. In her memoir, unSweetined, Jodie Sweetin recalled dealing with her drug and alcohol addiction as a teenager. She revealed that she was "high as a kite" after snorting meth in a bathroom stall during the 2004 premiere of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen's movie New York Minute.
She also said in 1996 she had gotten so drunk at Candace Cameron Bure's wedding that she vomited and had to be carried out. She added, "I probably had two bottles of wine, and I was only 14. That first drink gave me the self-confidence I had been searching for my whole life. But that set the pattern of the kind of drinking that I would do."
19. Finally, in her book, Mean Baby, Selma Blair wrote that she struggled with alcohol addiction for years and revealed that the first time she got "very drunk" was at a Passover celebration when she was only seven years old. "When I drank, I didn’t know what drama I would find, but I knew it was drama that I would feel," she said. "I needed it. I looked forward to it. It was always my way out."
She also wrote that alcohol put her in a dark place, and caused her to have suicidal ideation. After one attempt, she began attending Alcoholics Anonymous sessions. "With the introduction of AA, I felt hope for the first time in my life," she wrote.
