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Former Beverly Hills 90210 Jennie Garth has a new memoir out, and in it, she shares some shocking details about her personal life.
In excerpts published before the book hit stores, Garth revealed that she got her stomach pumped after overdosing on pills and alcohol during her divorce from Peter Facinelli.
Now that the full book has been released, we know that Jennie had a similar breakdown during her temporary split from her current husband, Dave Abrams.
Garth recalls one painful incident in which her daughter Luca, now 28, caught her engaging in self-harm.
“I was in my room smashing framed pictures of me and Dave, overcome by the pain,” Garth writes.
“I was taking the broken glass from the picture frames and I was trying to cut myself with the jagged pieces. I was certainly not in my right mind,” she continues, adding:
“It was almost an unconscious act, a form of punishment.”
In the book, Garth explains that her third marriage began to fall apart after she suffered four miscarriages and underwent grueling IVF treatment.
“Dave said he just had to get out of there, and so he did,” she writes.
She credits Luca with rescuing her on the night in question.
“She took the glass from me, and cleaned up, while I buried myself in my bed, covering up with blankets of shame. The next morning, I woke up and my self-hatred was at an all-time high,” Garth writes, adding:
“I was being so selfish and self-indulgent, and now I was terrified that I had caused irreparable damage to my relationship with my daughter.
“I was hurting my daughter by letting her see me like that. This was one of those regrets in life that stay with you forever. Luca said, ‘You can’t go on like this Mom. We need you.’”
Garth reveals in her book that, depite their reconciliation, Dave kept the manila envelope containing their divorce papers in his truck “for quite a few years”.
“I think it represented something profoundly freeing to him: He has a choice. To be together or to split. He can sign those papers anytime he wants. We all have free will,” she writes.
Garth says she struggled with the pressures of fame and began battling depression while she was still in her teens.
“For a long time, I thought needing help — needing medication — made me less than. It felt shameful to be on that kind of medicine as a young woman who seemed to be living the dream,” she writes of being on antidepressants.
“I carried the weight of feeling weak and somehow damaged through years of trying different medications. I tried them all, chasing balance and battling the belief that I shouldn’t have to. What I see now is that the real strength was in refusing to give up on myself.”
Jennie’s memoir, I Choose Me, is available online and in bookstores now.
