By Donovan Levine
Freeform Editor

This summer, actress and model Bella Thorne published a book called “The Life Of A Wannabe Mogul: Mental Disarray.” This book was a poetry collection, and a rather bizarre one at that as one can guess from its title.

At first glance, I noticed the style of the text. Letters are jumbled together. Nothing is neat or organized. There are belligerent spelling errors. The pages are riddled with photo-copied smudges and doodles for personal effect. There is no central theme to be found. However, all of these qualities are widely intentional.

Bella Thorne is the epitome of a 21st-century celebrity. Her career began as a Disney actress in 2003, when she was only 6-years-old. Her entire life has revolved around the “celeb” status, being involved in modeling, acting and most recently, becoming an author.

Without detailing her entire biography, the important takeaways from her life are the loss of her dad early on, a case of child sexual abuse when she was working in the industry, coming out to the world as pansexual and her involvement with the feminist and LGBTQ+ movements. She is no stranger to the controversy of concepts such as mental health and identity.

At 21-years-old, she still may not have that real grip on her life just yet, and that is clearly illustrated in “The Life Of A Wannabe Mogul.”

And that’s okay. What makes this book unique is that you can tell she wrote it for herself and nothing else: not for fame, money, legacy, to impress someone or to prove something. It’s her way of revealing the real Bella Thorne to the world, regardless of their opinions.

“I’m not fixing my imperfections for your idea of perfect.” One of the very first lines of the book highlights that she has no intention of writing this for anyone else.

The themes of the book vary from page to page. One page will deal with the idea of love, another with the idea of loss and regret. Others are simply one-line sentiments similar to something you would read in a Twitter post. One page is dedicated as a letter to her mother. There’s a sense of both wit and wisdom in her writing style.

“The Life Of A Wannabe Mogul” is written with brutal and beautiful authenticity.

In an interview with the live-streaming series BUILD, Bella told the audience with a solemn, cynic-like tone, “You have to just stick it through. Just keep waking up every day, because that is the bravest thing, realistically, you can do in the shittiest situation is to wake up again and again and again.” 

Assessing her life situation when it comes to mental health, sexual abuse, the loss of a parent and the lengths she had to go through to hide all of it because of her celebrity status, it wouldn’t shock me if she told herself this same quote almost every day.

With that in mind, reading the book and knowing her life story from childhood to where she is now and knowing what it takes to bring your private life into the public eye, it adds a layer of bravery to her writing.