Jennie Garth is writing her second act as a declaration. In a new memoir and a PEOPLE cover story, the 54-year-old says the phrase that once defined her character on Beverly Hills 90210 — “I choose me” — came back to her after she turned 50, and this time it meant something different.
Her memoir, I Choose Me: Chasing Joy, Finding Purpose, and Embracing Reinvention, arrives April 14 from Park Row, an imprint of HarperCollins. Garth says fame from the Fox series was so intense it pushed her inward, and that she spent years living an isolated life, avoiding eye contact and keeping people away from her private world. “It was like being in The Beatles,” she said of landing on 90210 in May 1995. “There was no preparation for it. It was scary and unknown for all of us, and it was like sink or swim, just survive and figure it out as you go. It was major on-the-job training.”
The book reaches well beyond the nostalgia of Kelly Taylor. Garth writes about pressure to be skinny and beautiful, saying it led her to restrict calories and get breast implants. She also details a painful divorce from actor Peter Facinelli in 2012 after 17 years of marriage and three daughters together, along with miscarriages and mental health struggles that followed the show’s end. At her lowest, she says she drank and took pills one night to the point that she needed her stomach pumped, before later spending time at Canyon Ranch rehab center to learn how to stop self-medicating in harmful ways.
That history is what gives the new book its weight. Garth has long been associated with the “I choose me” moment that aired in May 1995, when Kelly Taylor faced a choice between Dylan McKay and Brandon Walsh. In the memoir, though, the line becomes something more personal: after turning 50, she says, the phrase returned to her and began to resonate. “Even though it took a while, I’m finally at a place comfortable choosing myself,” she said. She also said, “I’m my own worst critic,” and added, “I was so hard on myself.”
The tension in her story is that the same instinct that once helped her survive sudden fame later became a habit of retreat. Garth says she noticed her light dimming and could see the damage in the mirror, including what grief and anger were doing to her relationships and to how she felt about herself. She says that changed when she decided to forgive Facinelli, and now describes them as friendly coparents. For Garth, the title is not a slogan anymore. It is the conclusion she says she had to earn: after years of hiding, hurting and self-medicating, choosing herself is finally the part that holds.
