This Is Us star Chrissy Metz writes about her early struggles with weight and poverty and her later success as an actress in her new memoir.
In an excerpt from the book This Is Me, appearing in the April 2 People magazine, the 37-year-old describes growing up poor and overweight in Florida.
She also reveals the abuse she endured as a child. According to the excerpt of the book, Metz’s biological father left her, her mother Denise and her two siblings, Monica and Philip, when Metz was just eight years old.
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Her mother had another child, Morgana, with her new boyfriend who skipped town. Metz’ mother went on to marry a man named Trigger.
“My mom married Trigger at the courthouse,” Metz writes in her book. “Soon she was pregnant again, with another girl, Abigail. Trigger loved his two biological children and was even welcoming to Morgana. Me, not so much. My mother was always at work, so she didn’t see how he treated me.”
Metz says that her body “seemed to offend him, but he couldn’t help but stare, especially when I was eating.”
“He joked about putting a lock on the refrigerator. We had lived with a lack of food for so long that when it was there, I felt like I had to eat it before it disappeared. Food was my only happiness,” she writes.
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As a result, Metz would “hide her eating” and eat to experience “the brief bliss of numbness.”
She said her stepfather would physically abuse her. “I don’t remember why Trigger hit me the first time. He never punched my face. Just my body, the thing that offended him so much,” she writes.
She continues: “He shoved me, slapped me, punched my arm. He would hit me if he thought I looked at him wrong. I remember being on the kitchen floor after he knocked me over, and I was begging to know what I did. He just shoved me hard with his foot.”
Sadly, Metz writes that the abuse became worse as a teen and claimed Trigger weighed her.
“He sat in a chair next to the scale as I got on. ‘Good God almighty!’ he yelled every single time,” she writes. “The number then was about 140 or 130. Most of my friends weighed about 90 pounds. ‘Why are you getting fatter?’ he demanded. I look at pictures of me from that time, and I would be so fine with being that size now. But I thought I was gigantic. By then, the beating had escalated. One time he hit me, and I looked right in his face. If I had a gun, I thought, I would shoot you.”
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Metz reveals that through it all, she still loved her stepfather.
According to People, Trigger has since shown remorse for their past. The actress claims he even wrote her a letter when she moved to Hollywood to pursue her acting career, in which he told her how proud he was of her and that he loved her.
“That’s all I ever wanted him to say,” she writes.
In addition to writing about her stepfather, she writes about her first kiss but says the boy would not acknowledge it in public. She moved to Los Angeles in 2003 to pursue her dream of becoming an actress and writes about the fat-shaming she’s experienced in Hollywood.
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She says her role as Kate in the NBC drama has changed her life and she is “embracing the idea that people could be inspired by me.”
Metz’s memoir This Is Me comes out March 29.
—With files from the Associated Press
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