Jennie Garth started her podcast I Choose Me in April 2024. She’s used it as a platform to speak about her experiences in Hollywood, her mental and physical health, and more. Jennie also has a new memoir coming out on April 14 that’s titled I Choose Me: Chasing Joy, Finding Purpose, and Embracing Reinvention. She discusses the imposter syndrome that she felt after 90210 hit it big. Paparazzi were following her around nonstop and she had to set up boundaries to maintain her privacy. It was so bad in those early years that Jennie equates her experience to what the Beatles went through after they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964.
In May of 1995, Jennie Garth’s Beverly Hills 90210 character Kelly Taylor was facing a conundrum: both Dylan McKay (Luke Perry) and Brandon Walsh (Jason Priestley), the hottest guys at West Beverly Hills High, were demanding she decide between them.
“I choose me,” her character told them, walking away from both.
“At that age, I didn’t really get it,” Garth, 54, tells PEOPLE of the feminist sentiment with a laugh.
But now Garth, who in the decades after the show ended endured a painful divorce, miscarriages and mental health struggles, finally gets it.
After she turned 50, she says, “The phrase just came back to me and it started to really resonate.” Garth, who has since found sobriety, confidence and a new sense of purpose is leaning into the “I Choose Me” movement with a podcast and her new memoir, I Choose Me: Chasing Joy, Finding Purpose, and Embracing Reinvention, out April 14 from Park Row, an imprint of Harper Collins.
“Even though it took a while, I’m finally at a place comfortable choosing myself,” she says.
If it seems unlikely that someone like Garth would spend most of her life struggling with self-worth and imposter syndrome, she explains that — unlike Kelly Taylor — she didn’t grow up anywhere near Beverly Hills and certainly had no inkling that she’d one day become one the most famous teens on the planet when she was cast on 90210.
“It was like being in The Beatles,” she says. “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.”
She struggled with intense anxiety from the constant exposure, and did everything she could to protect her privacy.
“I really did a good job, to the point where I walked around not making eye contact with people, not wanting anybody to know anything about my life,” she says. “That led me into a very isolated existence.”
She also didn’t feel worthy of the hype. “I’m my own worst critic,” she says. In the book, she writes of the pressure to be skinny and beautiful, leading her to restrict calories and get breast implants. “I was so hard on myself,” she says.
I skimmed through some online comments about Jennie’s Beatles comparison and a lot of people seem to be stuck on that phrasing. Maybe I’m wrong, but the way that I read it was that she’s not saying that 90210 was just as big a phenomenon as the Beatles. She’s using it as an analogy for the huge amount of attention that she and her castmates suddenly had, which I can understand. That era of celebrity culture was beyond wild and crazy. It was so intense that many celebrities are on record as having barely made it out alive. I firmly believe that all studios or SAG insurance plans should cover extensive mental health plans, especially for the 0-23 demographic. I’m really glad that Jennie was able to get the help that she needed.
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That show was huge so I get what she’s saying. It just means they were constantly being followed. They were at least lucky that this was before the internet.
Also that picture of Kelly and Brenda in the same dress. Haha
I mean, it was an absolutely epic show. If you weren’t a preteen or teen when 90210 came out you probably wouldn’t realize what a huge deal it was and yes, the cast was essentially an overnight phenomenon much like The Beatles. I don’t have any problem with the comparison–she’s not saying that they were as talented or as influential as The Beatles or whatever. People need to calm down lol.
This exactly. The headline is clickbaity and I was absolutely prepared to be all gurl take a thousand seats, but yeah what she’s saying is accurate, being thrust into massive fame with minimal preparation and support.
She was also Kelly friggin’ Taylor to the world, not a real person. Forget the male gaze, she was a teen girl’s fantasy: rich, beautiful, adored, and edgy enough to have secret problems.
I understood exactly what she meant, almost overnight being thrust into unimaginable fame.
Speaking of The Beatles, I recently watched the new McCartney documentary on Amazon Prime Video, “Man on the Run,” chronicling the decade when The Beatles were splitting up and Paul’s emotional upheaval as a 27-year-old, who had only ever known his life as the fab four, and his depression and turmoil as he navigated the split and moving on. I thought it would be sanitized, but acclaimed Oscar and Grammy documentary winner, Morgan Neville, helmed this project. He did a great job. I highly recommend it. It is truly a love letter to Linda, and there is so much footage, especially from Linda on their farm in Scotland in those early days when Paul retreated. It keeps you back in the late ’60s through late ’70s, which is where it ends. No present-day intrusion except occasional voiceovers from Paul, his daughters, Sean Lennon, Mick Jagger, etc, but you never see them.
But, anyway, they had become pretty huge in the UK and I guess Europe, but coming to America on the Ed Sullivan show thrust them into the stratosphere. They were completely hounded. The doc showed clips of that time. They had to quit touring because they couldn’t hear themselves singing and playing their instruments because of the screaming of the fans.
That’s what Jennie was equating it to. Not that they were as big as The Beatles, but that it felt like overnight they were thrust into the stratosphere, and she lost any semblance of anonymity, with all of the intrusion of obsessive fans and the press.
Good article, thank you. I never would have remembered the scene that’s the source of that catchphrase, I Choose Me, even though I was a mild fan of the show in the early seasons. And knowing the source makes me like it rather than finding it pretentious.
I agree with others here that the Beatles comparison is not disrespectful to the Beatles. I wish Jennie well!