Ever since Madison Beer’s sudden entrance into the spotlight at age twelve, she’s been contending with online hatred on every platform. I’ve been a big fan of her music for a long time, and when her memoir came out on April 25th, I was curious as to how she was going to approach topics like social media and mental health. And boy, she did not disappoint. Covering everything from contending with studio executives to her two failed suicide attempts, Beer’s raw vulnerability leaks from every page. There’s so much we don’t know about celebrities, and Beer is careful to pull back each layer of her humanity for us to see.
The book consists of a preface and fifteen chapters, with a few journal prompts and questions from fans sprinkled in. Beer covers a lot of ground. She discusses having explicit photos of her leaked at age fifteen and the subsequent PTSD and trust issues she developed from it. She tackles her initial reluctance to try therapy and coming to terms with her borderline personality disorder diagnosis. But the biggest standout for me comes in Chapter Eleven, “The Road Not Taken,” when Beer mentions a time when she accidentally overdosed on pills and refused to go to the hospital for fear of paparazzi and online hate. It displays the dangerous side of Hollywood and fame, of knowing that nothing is truly private and that everything can be taken out of context and twisted into something much darker than it truly is.
Of course she also talks about people who changed her life for the better, like her best friend Lena Fultz, who Beer met online after discovering a post Fultz had written defending the singer from online hatred. She talks about her love for her family and how her mother had sacrificed her career to support her dreams. Beer is very clear that there are two sides to everything, and that it is perfectly normal for people to struggle internally even if they are professionally successful.
Madison Beer’s memoir covers a multitude of topics in a manner that is insanely relatable to a generation that has grown up surrounded by technology. She’s careful not to seem ungrateful for her success, but she also makes it very clear that internet fame does not equal happiness. Each subject is covered in depth and with a maturity that truly demonstrates how far this young star has come on her journey. And she makes it very clear that that journey is far from over.