This is great for fans of America's Next Top Model! It dives into the history and behind the scenes.

I don't usually do one-liners (or one-ish-liners), but this calls for one: If you watched ANTM back in the day and still think about it sometimes, read this book. Skip the reviews and go straight for the book. Just do it.

Oh gosh. This book. This SHOW. America's Next Top Model is possibly the first show of which I watched entire seasons—it was the mid-2000s, I was in boarding school, and there was a television in the hall lounge. (Television wasn't a thing at home, hence not really having watched most other shows.) ANTM was still new (cycle 2 when I entered boarding school), and my dorm was OBSESSED. The contestants seemed so glamorous, and at that point Tyra Banks still seemed mostly sane. We were young and we were dumb—like, really nerdy and book-smart, but also really dumb—and for a while when cycle 3 or 4 was airing we tried to talk the tallest, thinnest girl on hall into sending in an audition tape. (Fortunately, she was also possibly the shyest girl on hall, so she sensibly ignored us.)

Hartshorne's season (cycle 9) aired when I was in college, and I know I was still watching—I know I watched the entirety of her season—though I can't remember if it was a watch-on-the-dorm-TV thing or a watch-on-my-laptop thing. It's been years since I've been able to stomach even a snippet of Tyra Banks talking, and all of the seasons blend together, and when I looked up Hartshorne and the various other contestants she mentions I went "oh yeah, I remember her", and then I had to look them all up again repeatedly because really, I watched a *lot* of ANTM and it was a *long* time ago.

I didn't know that this was the ANTM book I've been waiting for since high school, but this is just about everything I could have hoped for in an ANTM memoir. I had to force myself not to read the entire thing in a day; instead I read the entire thing in a day and a half. Hartshorne is writing from enough distance to have eyes wide open, and better than that, she's funny (which maybe you should expect from a comedian! But again, I have followed exactly none of the contestant's careers, so what do I know).

"'What's everybody's schtick?' asked one girl.
'I was just wondering that!' I said. 'I think I'd be the ditzy one.'
'That's so silly!' said a girl with piercing blue eyes. 'I'd be the beautiful one,' she added, flipping her long blond hair over her shoulder.
Maybe, I thought, I will be the second-most ditzy one." (loc. 298*)

And later:

"After a while, one of the girls whispered, 'I think they're taking us to meet with a therapist.'
[...]
'My parents will be so mad if they find out I talked to a therapist.'
'So will my boyfriend!'
My eyes bugged out of my head. I wanted to tell them those were actually both great reasons to see a therapist." (loc. 623)

But it's also really, really thoughtful. If any of the girls mentioned above made it to the actual show—the first quote is from the open call Hartshorne went to; the second is from the pre-show chaos in Puerto Rico, when they were down to 50-odd girls but the eventual cast had yet to be finalized—we never find out, and they can't be identified from that info alone; later, although Hartshorne is *biting* about some of the people involved in the production of the show (certain personalities Do Not Come Off Well, to say the least), she says this about conversations with the other contestants: "We talked about everything: ambitions, creative desires, sex. And since I would never share any of their stories, I can only tell you my own contributions" (loc. 1745). Though the other contestants show up repeatedly, as well they should, Hartshorne writes of them with nothing but respect—if this is a tell-all, they are not the people who need to be told on.

Reality TV is manufactured reality, of course; by now most of us know this. But as the book goes on, it becomes clearer and clearer just how much the show prioritized the show (and their own paychecks—the contestants, of course, were not being paid beyond a not-guaranteed food stipend) over reality or over the contestants' well-being. I'll leave most of the stories to Hartshorne's telling (did I not tell you to skip the reviews and go read the book already?), but I do want to talk about the completely bonkers scenario of being a plus-sized model on this show.

"Of course, I was also looking at everyone's physical size and comparing it with mine. I wondered if they could all instantly tell that I was the plus-size contestant." (loc. 1215)

I'm not here to discuss Hartshorne's body or size (or the bodies or sizes of any of the other contestants), but it is *absolutely batshit* that—on ANTM, but also in the modelling industry more generally—the size window for "straight size" models is so narrow that it might not be immediately clear who is classed as "plus size". (There's also the part where pretty much everything ANTM did for the plus-sized contestants had nothing to do with industry reality? Like, cutting off all of Hartshorne's hair and thus making her unbookable at agencies that hired plus-sized models; handing out a one-size-fits-all prize contract with an agency that did not work with plus-sized models...)

But more than that, it was immediately clear to Hartshorne that the show had a specific storyline for her, and that story was Sad Fat Girl:

"And now, as I looked around at all these achingly thin girls, it was starting to hit me that every challenge, every panel, every conversation going forward, was going to be about my weight. That was going to be My Thing, no matter what else I did." (loc. 583)

"'Do you think it [a near-collision] was because you're plus-size, because you took up more of the runway?'" (loc. 1885)

"I didn't want to do a naked photo shoot. It wasn't the actual being naked I was dreading. I'd run around the house naked. I was dreading the interview that would inevitably follow." (loc. 2334)

"They kept pressuring me to say that I hated my outfit, that I hated my body, that I was uncomfortable. And I just wouldn't. [...] while I didn't like my body, I wasn't going to say it. I was holding on to my dignity by a thread, but goddamn it, I wasn't going to let go. When the episode aired, they showed me saying things they took completely out of context—"That makes me super uncomfortable" and "I don't like it"—and made it seem like I was talking about my outfit." (loc. 2998)

Hartshorne was aware enough of what the show wanted from her that she developed a strategy (an excellent strategy, I must say) of trotting out whale facts instead of sound bites, but the whole thing is just...telling. Not surprising, but telling.

I don't know whether we've seen so few ANTM memoirs because of the dire warnings the producers gave the contestants about NDAs and so on (the gist of which: we own your life story now, and we can say whatever we want but you can't say anything at all or we will bankrupt you and your children and your children's children), but I am over here praying that this releases the floodgates—and that, in the meantime, Hartshorne makes some serious bank on it. Why are you still reading this review? Go read the book instead.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

I watched all the cycles of ANTM and loved getting to know the models from the show. I was so enthralled with Sarah's story and book, right from the start! It's authentic, raw, and truthful. I'm so happy this book exists. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.