Where Am I Now?: True Stories of Girlhood and Accidental Fame

A collection of personal essays from the former child actress who starred in Matilda and Mrs. Doubtfire describes what it was like to grow up as a female at the turn of the Millennium. Original.
The former child actor recounts her days on the sets of such films as "Matilda" and "Mrs. Doubtfire" and discusses her personal struggles with love, loss, and identity.
For readers of Lena Dunham, Allie Brosh and Roxane Gay, this funny, poignant, daringly honest collection of personal essays introduces Mara Wilson—the former child actress best known for her starring roles inMatilda and Mrs. Doubtfire—as a brilliant new chronicler of the experience that is growing up young and female Mara Wilson has always felt a little young and a little out of place: as the only child on a film set full of adults, the first daughter in a house full of boys, the sole clinically depressed member of the cheerleading squad, a valley girl in New York and a neurotic in California, and one of the few former child actors who has never been in jail or rehab. Tackling everything from how she first learned about sex on the set ofMelrose Place, to losing her mother at a young age, to getting her first kiss (or was it kisses?) on a celebrity canoe trip, to not being “cute” enough to make it in Hollywood, these essays tell the story of one young woman’s journey from accidental fame to relative (but happy) obscurity. But they also illuminate a universal struggle: learning to accept yourself, and figuring out who you are and where you belong. Exquisitely crafted, revelatory, and full of the crack comic timing that has made Mara Wilson a sought-after live storyteller and Twitter star, Where Am I Now? introduces a witty, perceptive, and refreshingly candid new literary voice.