Hayden Panettiere

Storm Santos

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The actress, now 36, says that in the decades since, there have been countless moments of misinformation — and that it’s what led to, and gave her the bravery to, finally sit down and write her memoir. In This Is Me: A Reckoning (out May 19), Panettiere delves into her experience as a child actor at the whim of an overly eager stage mom, navigating her time on hit television shows (Heroes and Nashville) while her personal life crumbled and the substance abuse issues that stemmed from it all. “One of the things that I was most terrified about, when deciding whether or not to write this book, was that I knew what was going to come along with it,” she says of the ways she’s been rehashing her traumas during the book’s still-nascent press tour. “I had to sit with myself and make a decision, and I realized it was more important for me to share my stories and to wipe the slate clean.”

Below, she speaks to The Hollywood Reporter about the biggest revelations from its pages: the powerful people who caused her harm, the way her personal tragedies affected her biggest career milestones and the way she’s reflecting on the business of acting as a whole.

Hachette Book Group

People have been really supportive of you coming out as bisexual in the book. Have you been engaging with the headlines this time around?

I’ve gotten a lot of positivity and it’s heartwarming. Reading those comments from people within the industry and outside of it, it makes me feel like I made the right decision to write the book.

A lot of the things that you discuss for the first time, like being bisexual, are things that you have known for a long time or experienced a long time ago. Is there anything in the book that you’re still trying to process?

Having to touch on everything about my relationship with my mother, that was one of the harder things to talk about. While writing it, I realized even more so how much of a toll it took on me. And then of course, anytime that [the death of] my little brother comes up. It’s still a subject where I’m moments from bursting into tears any time I try to talk about it. Time can be a great healer, but in this case, my grief just seems to evolve. It’s something I’ll never get over.

You write a lot about your family, whether it’s the complicated feelings you have about the way your mom pushed you during your career as a very young actress, or the dissolution of your parent’s marriage. Did you tell people you would be writing about these things?

I was fiercely protective of people in my writing. I felt very strongly about my ability to tell my stories and make them entertaining enough to put in a book, without having to drag people through the mud. I had members of my team that I would bounce ideas off of, or ask their opinions about things like that I was writing. I mean, my publicist is also my dear friend and I trust her, so I leaned on her to know. And then I made sure that Vlad [Klitschko, Panettiere’s ex-fiancé and father of her daughter] wasn’t going to be upset with me. But other than that, I just had to speak my truth — and it’s mine alone.

There are some celebrities that you name, like when you discuss getting set up with Steven Colletti, or dating and then breaking up with Milo Ventimiglia. And others whom you don’t name, like the incident on the yacht with the much older man. Was there a strategy for who did or didn’t get named?

Yeah, because it was a bad look for them and [the people I didn’t name] were generally people within my industry. They’re people I could run into again. I did

Hayden Panettiere Memoir: What It Was Like on Heroes, Nashville, Scream