Where Am I Now?

by Mara Wilson

ISBN 978-0-14-312822-9

“The grown-ups around me talked about my ‘anxiety’ but they never said ‘disorder.’ Nobody seemed to want to acknowledge that there was something wrong with me. It was just my age, they said, or a stage of grief, but one that would pass. I would grow out of it.”

When I first joined Twitter back in 2009, I didn’t really know what I was doing with it. I followed a few famous people and media outlets, and mostly used it as a news feed. For three years that was about all I did, until I started blogging in 2012. Suddenly I was using Twitter on a much more regular basis, following dozens of new people every day. As I got more familiar with the platform, I started becoming more selective however, honing the type of account I followed, and unfollowing many of the accounts I’d started out with. Actors and other celebrities were among the first to go. But I held onto at least one, a former child star named Mara Wilson. She and I were about the same age, and she had starred in a lot of films from my childhood, like Mrs. Doubtfire, the remake of Miracle on 34^th Street, and my personal favourite, Matilda, based on the Roald Dahl novel I’d reread countless times. Of course, this might have had something to do with one interviewer describing her as “a writer who once had an acting phase.” Her Twitter feed was funny and relatable.

Nowadays, Wilson is a writer and storyteller, occasional stage performer and voice actor. Where Am I Now? is her first book, a collection of essays that span from her child actor days to the death of Robin Williams in 2014. In between, she writes about her mother’s death from cancer, her own years long struggle with depression, anxiety, and obsessive compulsive disorder, and the time after her 2010 graduation from NYU when she was trying to figure out what to do with her life. From high school show choir performances to being the only storyteller in rooms full of stand-up comedians, Wilson has undoubtedly led an interesting and varied life, and she shares it here with a candid vulnerability.

For those who arrive at the collection because they remember Wilson from her child actor days, there is plenty here, including reflections on her on-set experiences, and reminiscences about her former co-stars. Particularly noteworthy is the inclusion of the essay she published on her blog following Robin William’s death in 2014, after she refused to appear on any news media outlets to speak about him. In it, she frankly addressed mental health, including her own struggles with anxiety and OCD. She gives equal depth to her reflections on the experience of being a child actor, such as the “Hollywood induced body dysmorphic disorder” that left her extremely insecure and critical of her personal appearance long after she had given up film acting. She was also left with a profound fear of her own sexuality, having been trained to constantly worry about what any hint of scandal might do to her squeaky clean reputation. She dubs this the “Matilda-whore complex.”

Wilson has a wandering, tangential style that skips across time and connects disparate topics and events. It is loose, while never quite losing the thread. She delves into relationships of all kinds, from the difficulty of making friends when you leave school for months at a time to film on location, to being a member of “the saddest sorority,” women who lost their mothers very young. With a sister six years younger than herself, Wilson also found herself trying to fill that unfillable gap in her sister’s life, and I particularly enjoyed the pieces that dealt with her siblings. She recounts the difficulty of dating other child stars, or for that matter, any boy, because no one wants to think about Matilda having sex. And that, for her, is the most complicated relationship of her life, with a character she loved and wanted desperately to play, but then also had to live alongside for the rest of her life. She grapples her way through this in an essay called “A Letter,” which begins “Dear Matilda,” and goes on to address the character directly.

This isn’t a salacious memoir, in that Wilson is mostly exposing herself, not others. One high school friend and a first boyfriend do not come off particularly well, but Wilson uses this mostly to reveal her own insufficiencies in these situations. The boyfriend was a fellow child actor, and the friend was caught up with her in a toxic and competitive high school show choir environment. Wilson is willing to lay her awkwardness and anxiety bare, and as someone with a strong aversion to awkwardness—I basically suffer vicarious embarrassment—some of these pieces were hard to read, but the honesty and humour kept me going. And I can’t wait to see what Wilson will write next, now that she has dealt with the most obvious material.