Dedication
For all the badass women in the world,
especially the ones who asked
me to write this book.
This is for you.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
1. Life According to Little Amanda
2. Getting a Job That Doesn’t Suck—Even If You Went to Juvie and Left School at Fifteen
3. Love, Obsession, and How to Tell the Difference
4. I Know Myself Better Than You Do: Some Thoughts on Sex
5. Porn Culture, and Its Effect on My Vagina
6. The Love of My Life (and There Are a Few)
7. Not All Teen Moms Are Crazy
8. Baby Chaos: The First Year of Motherhood
9. How to Parent in the Time of Trump
10. Be a Girl’s Girl Every Day and All the Way
11. Diets That Don’t Work but Do Give You a Bunch of Weird Health Problems (and Other Body Issues)
12. It’s Never Okay
13. Pain Is Not Without Purpose
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
I consider myself to be a relatively fearless woman. I’ve been riding motorbikes since I was six years old, hosting live TV since I was fifteen, and I gave birth to my first child at nineteen. But when Hillary Clinton walked toward me at her campaign headquarters at One Pierrepont Plaza in Brooklyn in January 2016, I momentarily lost my mind. A trickle of perspiration ran down between my boobs. My tongue got thick and dry, as if I’d smoked too much weed, and then my mind went blank. I couldn’t remember my name . . . or her name . . . and what the hell was I supposed to call her again?
Secretary Clinton?
Hillary?
First Lady?
Suddenly, I felt far from fearless. My entire being was flooded with self-doubt.
What the fuck am I doing here?
I shouldn’t have agreed to do this.
How could she have agreed to do this?
And how have I passed the Secret Service background check?
I was seconds away from interviewing one of the most powerful and fascinating women on earth. Love her or hate her, you have to admit the prospect of interviewing the woman who everyone thought was about to become the first female president of the United States is daunting. Besides the boob sweat and dry mouth, all I could think about were the illegal drugs I’d done twenty years ago, the time I’d spent locked up in juvie as a teenage runaway (more on that soon), and the expired driver’s license I’d been using for the last six months. I was sure that, at any moment, a member of her staff would discover these marks on my record and I’d be embarrassingly removed by her security detail.
Fear, my old friend, was talking to me loud and clear.
But to my surprise, the former secretary of state casually approached me, looking very Hillz in an excellent red-coat-and-black-pant suit, and gave me a big smile. “Hi, Amanda.”
Of course, being a superpro, she knew my name. Hillz extended her hand, and as soon as we locked eyes, my fear and anxiety immediately evaporated. In that moment, I remembered exactly how I had earned the right to conduct this interview: I had consistently worked my ass off interviewing people since I was fifteen years old, and I had overcome endless adversity and personal challenges. All because I held on to the belief that, one day, I would be able to hold my own with the lady who was now standing in front of me.
When I started my talk show, The Conversation, from my living room six years ago, my vision was to facilitate honest conversations with respected women that would inspire and empower other women to live their lives fearlessly. I was fortunate that some of the most intelligent, iconic, insightful women on the planet—ladies like Jane Fonda, Lady Gaga, Gwyneth Paltrow, Arianna Huffington, Sarah Silverman, and Alicia Keys—agreed to sit on my couch and talk to me about their loves, losses, successes, and failures. For the last forty-five years, Barbara Walters had cornered the market on long-form interviews, and I felt that as she was fast approaching her eighties, maybe, just maybe it was time for another woman to be allowed into the one-on-one interview realm. My intention wasn’t to make guests cry, which often happened; I just wanted to create a safe space where women could share their truths. It’s in those unfiltered and vulnerable moments you realize that we all have more in common than we might think, that we’ve all been through stuff, and that every female has a story to tell, whether she’s won an Oscar or a two-dollar scratch-off card at 7-Eleven.
My own story is shocking, funny, tragic, lucky as fuck, and, of course, messy. Very, very messy. Just based on my tricky childhood, I shouldn’t have amounted to much. This might sound strange coming from the daughter of a race car driver dad and a model mom. Those who knew our family in London probably thought I had it made, as I was born into a very privileged situation, no question about it. But privilege doesn’t protect you from everything. Especially if you have a vagina.
I believe now, more than ever, that anyone who identifies as being female will, at some point, face one or more of the following life challenges: gender discrimination, body anxiety, unwanted sexual attention or advances, various forms of addiction, and heartbreak. There is not a career, relationship, or diet that makes you exempt from these issues. If there were, I’m pretty sure I would have discovered it long ago.
Let me say this now, though: this is not a self-help book. It is not a diary. I haven’t kept one of those since I was a teenager, when a tabloid stole it and published excerpts as if it were a Jackie Collins novel. I’m not a licensed therapist. My only credentials are my life experiences, and there are a whole lot of them, both incredible and very messy, that’s for sure.
I’m hoping that in sharing my stories with you, as my guests do on The Conversation, I might offer you some experiential insights. I’ve been through the shitty—slut shaming, cheating, divorce, sexual abuse, domestic violence, going broke—the fantastic—exciting career, passionate love, marriage, and beautiful children—and the ugly—betrayal, health scares, body issues, and friendships gone bad. It’s Messy is a collection of very personal essays, written in bits and pieces between parenting my three kids, putting the time in to keep my marriage going strong, learning to compromise and communicate more than I thought possible, and working three jobs.
I’m not always happily married, but I have been with the same man for sixteen years. I am not a blissed-out mother, but I am extremely proud of my twenty-five-year-old daughter, Atlanta, and my delicious ten-year-old twins, Ella and Silvan. I’m not the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, but I am the founder and CEO of my own media company, which I’ve built from scratch and worked my ass off to grow exponentially year after year.
Each chapter in this book is inspired by questions posed by the awesome women and girls in my digital community. They were kind enough to let me know what they wanted me to write about, and I have obliged (for the most part). From boobs, babies, and best friends to bank accounts, beauty, and boys, I’m hoping that sharing some of the good, bad, and ugly from my life will inspire you to explore what makes you tick, and make you feel less alone on your own unique journey.
Writing this book has been, hands down, one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. My friends who are writers assured me that it would be like childbirth—that I wouldn’t remember the pain once the book was published. But I think I will. This has been one hell of an experience. Not only has it been overwhelming and terrifying, but it has also made me recognize that I’ve survived some crazy-ass shit.
Heads up. This book does not need to be read in sequence. If you just want to identify with someone about love and
heartbreak, head to chapter 3. If you’re in the chaos of new motherhood, turn to chapter 8. Or if it’s the morning after a one-night stand, you may want to turn straight to chapter 4. It’s Messy is a book I hope you will come back to over the years, as a reminder that you are not flawed without hope. Shit happens to everyone. And you and I, and every other woman out there, should not have to do it alone. Even when it’s super goddamn messy.
1.
Life According to Little Amanda
A lot of people thought I was destined for a life of ease the moment I came into the world. But trust me, even privileged girls can go through the wringer.
My father, Alain de Cadenet, was a successful Le Mans race car driver and my mother, Anna, was a model turned full-time mom turned interior designer. I grew up in Chelsea, a posh London neighborhood, with Jane Birkin and Mick Jagger as our neighbors. No big deal, just how it was on our block. My handsome dad was the guy too many of my school friends had a crush on, and I hear he reciprocated those feelings with one of my friends; she was over the age of consent, but still. My super foxy mom, Anna de Cadenet, would pick me up from school in her sporty BMW, dressed to impress in Thierry Mugler high heels and hot-pink ’80s spandex. I remember people staring at my parents, and staring at me and my little brother, Alexander. We were apparently a family that people liked to look at. My mother would say, “Amanda, people will stare at you all your life because you are pretty. But it doesn’t mean you’re special.” Because the outsides drew attention, she never let my brother and I forget that it was the kind of people we were on the inside that really counted, and I still believe that today.
As a young kid, I, Little Amanda, was full of confidence and genuine curiosity about the world. I’ve got photos of myself roller-skating up my street wearing faded dark-blue corduroy pants, odd socks, and a bright-colored, stripy roll-neck. The smile on my face is one of pure joy. I’ve come back to this image many, many times when I need to remind myself that I was a relatively happy child . . . until I wasn’t anymore, which seemed to coincide with me turning eleven, when my parents separated and my world started to fall apart. As is common when parents split, I continued living with my mom. My parents divorced for reasons still not entirely known to me, and I’ve since made peace with the fact that I may never know the truth. My father moved into the home of his weird friend, whom I accidentally saw naked on more than one occasion when I was visiting my dad. Needless to say, I avoided going there as much as possible, and the image of this guy’s gigantic penis is, unfortunately for me, seared into the early memory bank of my prefrontal cortex.
I deeply loved my parents, but during their divorce, I felt completely abandoned and pulled in two directions at once. My mom said my dad didn’t want to spend time with us. My dad said my mom refused to let him see my brother and me. It was one of those “he said, she said” situations that to this day has never resolved itself. I don’t have many memories from that time, except an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness and loss. I felt completely alone in the world and wondered who would take care of me, because I didn’t feel that anyone really was.
When I was fifteen I took matters into my own hands and I did what I thought was the best thing for me: I moved out of my mother’s home. I packed a trash bag full of clothes, walked to the subway, and headed to my best friend’s house. I secretly slept under the desk in her bedroom until her mom discovered me and told me to go home, but that just wasn’t an option for me anymore. I was convinced that if I was to survive, I had to start creating a world of my own, one that didn’t require me to rely on anyone but myself. At age fifteen, out of necessity, I became completely self-reliant.
Instead of going home, I moved into a very proper squat in Soho with a group of teen runaways like me. The apartment was one short block away from the Mud Club, the Limelight, and the rest of the scuzzy clubs I had begun to frequent. Bizarrely, it never seemed much of a problem to the bouncers, bartenders, or managers that I was so young. My face looked fifteen, but I had the body of a twenty-year-old, which gained me access to places I had no business being.
It was an extremely confusing time for me; the tumultuous thoughts in my head became unbearable and almost torturous. I was desperately trying to stay alive when it felt as if my mind was trying to kill me. It was as though I was constantly playing a chess game in my mind, analyzing the outcome of every possible move before deciding which one to choose.
It’s no surprise that I found ways to turn down the volume of the endlessly loud committee of voices in my brain constantly shouting: “Amanda, you will never amount to anything. You are nothing, useless. No one wants you, not even your own parents. Amanda, no one will even notice if you’re gone. If you do enough drugs, you can easily slip away in your sleep.”
Slipping away was a strong possibility. I’d spend most nights hanging out in sleazy clubs, doing drugs until the sun came up with whoever would give them to me—mostly other teen girls, lustful old men, and nightclub promoters. It took me a while to figure out the obvious: there is always someone willing to share their drugs with a girl they think they can fuck at the end of the night. But I wasn’t about to be that girl. I knew that was a road straight to nowhere. Even so, pretty quickly, without ever spending a dollar, I managed to develop a nasty drug problem.
Night after night, my last thought before I passed out into a pill-induced slumber was, I wonder if I’ll ever wake up. Only to wake up the next afternoon and start all over again. The vicious cycle of addiction is not discerning; it doesn’t care that I am someone’s daughter, that I am only fifteen, that I am smart, kind, and that I need serious help. My addiction wanted me dead, and more than a few times, I almost obliged.
One morning at six a.m., after being up all night getting high, I experienced what continues to be one of the most traumatic yet defining moments of my life.
I was lying on a mattress in the attic of the squat wearing nothing but my socks, trying to get my mind to stop racing after a night of drug use, when I heard a huge crash downstairs. The sound of wood splintering, then men’s voices getting closer and closer, and the sound of heavy-soled shoes rushing up the stairs into the bedroom where I was by now sitting up trying to make sense of the noise. It all happened so quickly. A whole lot of policemen burst into the room; someone shone a bright light into my face, then threw a rough blanket around me to cover my naked body; and before I could register what was happening, I was bundled down the stairs, my hands handcuffed behind my back, and literally thrown into the back of a van.
What the hell just happened?
My brain just could not compute.
I was sleep deprived, high, and naked, being taken to an unknown place in an unknown vehicle.
It never occurred to me that running away as a minor is illegal. My parents, at a loss over how to parent me, had reported me as a missing child, like the kind you see on the side of milk cartons. Except girls like me weren’t supposed to end up missing.
I was taken to the local police precinct where I was questioned about my activities, especially relating to prostitution, which was news to me. I had gotten up to some illegal activities, but this didn’t happen to be one of them.
The way I was interrogated by the male cops at the police station was nothing less than misogynistic and terrifying. They pulled my bras and underwear from my plastic bag of personal belongings, carefully examining them as if they held some clues to confirm their prostitution suspicions. The cops tried every manipulative tactic to get me to admit to selling my body, but I had nothing to confess other than I did have sex at age fifteen, which is considered an illegal activity. That admission got me placed on the “at risk” list, a list reserved for children who are victims of either sexual abuse or assault.
In retrospect, it’s insane to me that I was added to such a serious list. As I was soon to find out, there were kids who needed to be on it way more than me, but weren’t given the protection from social services that they so badly needed and deserved.
I had no idea what that meant, but I knew it meant I would not be myself in any way, shape, or form.
Believe it or not, living in a children’s home and essentially being the property of the government gave me a skill set that served me incredibly well throughout my life. For one thing, I learned that people’s circumstances are often not the best indicators of who they really are. Sometimes bad things happen to good people. And if I looked for the similarities with others rather than the differences, I found I had a lot more in common with most people.
In juvie, I quickly learned there was no such thing as privacy or safety. I kept my money—what little I had of it—shoved down the side of my lace-up army boot, waiting for the day I would be released back into the world, when I would need my fifty bucks to get wherever I was going.
During my stint at juvie, I made some friends but hung out with one girl more than the others. She was welcoming and kind, and taught me how to survive inside the system.
I had no idea she was a sex worker taking clients after school and that her pimp was a boy in juvie with us. I had been exposed to prostitution years earlier by my babysitter, but her confession shocked the shit out of me. Although nothing on the surface was similar about our respective lives, I found we did have a few significant things in common. We were both survivors of sexual assault, we both had low self-esteem, and we both received validation from being desired by men. My relationship with her was the first of many friendships where our wounds would deeply connect us.
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