Alyson Stoner's memoir, Semi-Well-Adjusted Despite Literally Everything, is out now. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photo: Maarten de Boer/Getty Images)Alyson Stoner's life radically and irreversibly changed in the aisle of a grocery store in 2002. A week after the MTV premiere of Missy Elliott's "Work It" music video, which featured a 9-year-old Stoner dancing for a few brief seconds in pigtails and a pink tracksuit, a stranger approached the child with a request."Are you the little white girl in the Missy video?" the man asked, before adding, "Can you do the dance?" The young dancer obliged, soon surrounded by customers watching the spectacle. This was the beginning of what Stoner, who uses they/them pronouns, calls "permanent performance mode."Stoner's career as a child star took off from there, and they became a mainstay on the Disney Channel for many years, appearing in Camp Rock and Mike's Super Short Show but never fully breaking out with their own series or movie like fellow Mouse House stars Miley Cyrus or Demi Lovato. It's an unusual trajectory, and Stoner's new book, Semi-Well-Adjusted Despite Literally Everything, is not the typical kid performer memoir. It's OK if you think so at first, though. It's all part of the plan.'Copy-and-paste downward spirals'Stoner says they noticed a series of recent memoirs and documentaries highlighting a "repeated pattern of former child performers ... experiencing copy-and-paste downward spirals," but no one had yet unpacked the ecosystem that creates that kind of pattern, nor tried to intervene and prevent it from continuing to harm children.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement"I thought, 'I want to not only share my lived experiences - yes, all of the juicy details from the sets growing up - but also connect new dots for people across media, culture, child development and the industry," Stoner, now 32, tells Yahoo over Zoom. "Folks might show up to read about the childhood chaos of it all, but I hope they stay for the cultural critique."Alyson Stoner's memoir, Semi-Well-Adjusted Despite Literally Everything, is out now. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photo: Maarten de Boer/Getty Images)Stoner is still an entertainer, and they recognize that their work onscreen is probably what you know them from. But they're also a mental health practitioner. For every reveal of childhood trauma or candid tale about a familiar name in their book, there's a revelation about something broken in the entertainment industry and a proposal to fix it.
Knowing that fame and trauma would be the draw for a lot of readers, Stoner worked with a writing supervisor to strategize about what exactly to include. It's written chronologically and guided by Stoner's inner monologue over time, pulling directly from journal entries.
With that in mind, the vulnerability on display is impressive. Stoner details heart-wrenching stories from their life: public and private scrutiny that contributed to an eating disorder that they sought treatment for in rehab, a tumultuous home life with an abusive stepfather and alcoholic mother, run-ins with stalkers and extortionists, rape and suicidal ideation. There are even stories about the inner workings of Hollywood and its stars that became tabloid fodder the same day the book was released.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementBut that's just Stoner's real life. They're working with what they've got."There are ways you can speak about your direct, personal experience and still honor the humanity of everyone involved while calling for some accountability, while accepting that there are consequences beyond my control, no matter what I do or don't say," Stoner says. "So I wanted to make sure that even though the truth is not always polite, I could still deliver it with integrity ... if I'm going to write a memoir, now is the time to get it [all] off my chest."'We're speaking about children as commodified products'Though the Disney Channel stars of today have a new playbook, Stoner says their learnings from childhood fame are more relevant than ever."Anyone with a Wi-Fi connection and social media profile can deal with challenges related to privacy, to safety, to parasocial relationships, mental health challenges due to our tech use," they say.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementIn June, I saw Stoner speak on a panel at VidCon, an annual convention for content creators and their fans. Their bravery stuck with me. Stoner interjected as experts were discussing how the kid influencer industry could protect the young and famous, speaking clinically and professionally about the laws and regulations in place to protect them."I do want to ground the conversation in the reality that we're speaking about children as commodified products at the moment. I was one of them," they said onstage. "There are well-meaning people in all areas of the [entertainment] industry, [but] the entire system of it is warped here ... we're talking abou