THIS IS ME

Looking back at a complicated life in and out of television and movies.

Panettiere, best known for roles in TV’s Heroes and Nashville, has been largely out of the spotlight lately, after struggles with addiction and recovery. Here, she moves at a measured pace through a show-biz life that began when she was a toddler, devoting equal time to amusing anecdotes about the making of various television shows and movies as well as deeper examinations of her personal life and the effect of her career on it. Born in 1989 and raised outside New York with a troubled younger brother, a firefighter father, and a perfectionist stage mom, Panettiere began appearing as a regular in soap operas by the time she was in kindergarten, reciting lines like, “Mommy! Don’t leave me!” She still has a fraught relationship with her mother, who regularly auditioned her daughter for commercials while she was in diapers. Her descriptions of experiences on TV and movie sets overlap with a difficult period of her personal life, when she became involved with a Ukrainian pro heavyweight fighter, had a baby, suffered severe postpartum depression, began to drink heavily, and surrounded custody of their child to the child’s father. Panettiere doesn’t ignore the years she spent in and out of rehab, and in an abusive relationship, after surrendering custody of her daughter, but she doesn’t make them the centerpiece of her story, either. She promises that she will cover “seven years of mental illness, addiction, rage, abuse, and pain in just a few pages,” and she’s as good as her word, moving on from them to an equally brief description of her recovery and what seems to be a stable state in the present.

A measured account of an acting career and its consequences.