
Semi-Well-Adjusted Despite Literally Everything
A Memoir
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Narrated by:
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By:
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Alyson Stoner
About this listen
Actor-dancer Alyson Stoner's revelatory and incisive memoir—from family violence and betrayal, to eating disorders and religious trauma—may begin in Hollywood, but its chilling relatability will resonate with anyone navigating identity, privacy, purpose, and mental health in a digital age.
Raised on soundstages and studio lots from the age of six, shuffling between auditions for Disney Channel, Cheaper by the Dozen, or Missy Elliott music videos, Alyson Stoner experienced many of the defining moments of childhood inside the bizarre fishbowl of Hollywood. From working eighty hours a week at eight years old, to learning how to distinguish fan mail from kidnapping plots, to TV execs saying they weren’t “anorexic enough” to stop working and get help, Alyson struggled to find stability and sanity in a chaotic world.
In Semi-Well-Adjusted Despite Literally Everything, Alyson shares their powerful story for the first time, detailing a turbulent home life fractured by substance abuse, harrowing accounts from rehab, the messy process of discovering their sexuality in church, rebuilding a life after an early professional peak, and charting a path of self-discovery and advocacy. With striking introspection, Alyson connects the dots across the entertainment industry ecosystem, child development, and media culture, exposing the “toddler to trainwreck pipeline” of child stars and sparking timely conversations about success and society’s enchantment with fame.
Bold, entertaining, warm, and galvanizing all at once, Semi-Well-Adjusted Despite Literally Everything is more than a personal memoir: it’s a beacon for industry reform, a road map for breaking the bonds of generational trauma, and a testament to the freedom and strength that come from finally trusting your own voice and power.
©2025 Alyson Stoner (P)2025 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"How can a book be so heart-breaking and yet so hopeful? Alyson’s memoir is a bracingly honest and necessary examination of what it actually means to be a child in the spotlight, and everything that happens after. Candid, insightful, and healing in ways I didn’t know I still needed."—JoJo Levesque, New York Times bestselling author of Over the Influence
"A ballsy page-turner that puts the greed of the entertainment industry on blast, while simultaneously being a grounded narrative of incredible tenacity, courage and healing. A compelling argument for the abolition of child stardom."—Stephanie Foo, New York Times bestselling author of What My Bones Know
“Semi-Well-Adjusted Despite Literally Everything is an intimate and compelling view into Alyson Stoner’s unique developmental journey as a child celebrity. Stoner courageously shares the challenges of a demanding professional life through family fractures, self-doubt and personal discovery. Stoner is a gifted storyteller; this book is a perfect mix of reflection, humor, generosity and empathy. It is the rare book that can carry so many important lessons without being shrill or preachy. Highly recommended.”—Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D., Principal of The Neurosequential Network and #1 New York Times bestselling co-author of What Happened to You
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Kiese Laymon is a fearless writer. In his essays, personal stories combine with piercing intellect to reflect both on the state of American society and on his experiences with abuse, which conjure conflicted feelings of shame, joy, confusion, and humiliation. Laymon invites us to consider the consequences of growing up in a nation wholly obsessed with progress yet wholly disinterested in the messy work of reckoning with where we’ve been.
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Be prepared
- By Amy Eberle on 10-30-18
By: Kiese Laymon
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First in the Family
- A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream
- By: Jessica Hoppe
- Narrated by: Jessica Hoppe
- Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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In this deeply moving and lyrical memoir, Hoppe shares an intimate, courageous account of what it means to truly interrupt cycles of harm. For fans of The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford, and Heavy by Kiese Laymon. During the first year of quarantine, drug overdoses spiked, the highest ever recorded. And Hoppe’s cousin was one of them. “I never learned the true history of substance use disorder in my family,” Hoppe writes. “People just disappeared.” At the time of her cousin’s death, she’d been in recovery for nearly four years, but she hadn’t told anyone.
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What a beautiful story of survival and strength
- By Jess Henriquez on 10-10-24
By: Jessica Hoppe
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Profiles in Mental Health Courage
- By: Patrick J. Kennedy, Stephen Fried
- Narrated by: Johnny Heller, Patrick J. Kennedy
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Several years ago, Patrick J. Kennedy shared the story of his personal and family challenges with mental illness and addiction—and the nation’s—in his bestselling memoir, A Common Struggle. Now, he and his Common Struggle coauthor, award-winning healthcare journalist Stephen Fried, have crafted this powerful new book sharing the untold stories of others—a special group who agreed to talk about their illnesses, treatments, and struggles for the first time.
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Thank you!
- By Me on 07-03-24
By: Patrick J. Kennedy, and others
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The Absence
- Memoirs of a Banshee Drummer
- By: Budgie
- Narrated by: Budgie
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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As a member of Big in Japan, The Slits and, most famously, Siouxsie and The Banshees and The Creatures, 'Budgie' became one of the era-defining drummers in the much-mythologised post punk scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s. A man and musician whose creativity and singular style came to define the goth-pop 1980s as much as any other individual, Budgie's life is both fabulously glamorous and a tawdry cautionary tale. For the first time the story of this most exalted and mysterious of bands has been told by one who survived inside the belly of the beast.
By: Budgie
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My Mess Is a Bit of a Life
- Adventures in Anxiety
- By: Georgia Pritchett
- Narrated by: Katherine Parkinson
- Length: 4 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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When Georgia Pritchett found herself lost for words—a bit of a predicament for a comedy writer—she turned to a therapist, who suggested she try writing down some of the things that worried her. But instead of a grocery list of concerns, Georgia wrote this book. Delightfully offbeat, painfully honest, full of surprising wonders, and delivering plenty of hilarious, laugh-out-loud moments, My Mess Is a Bit of a Life reveals a talented, vulnerable, and strong woman in all her wisecracking weirdness, and makes us love it—and her—too.
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Absolute perfection
- By Amazon Customer on 04-18-22