Bombshells for days. Hannah Brown, Will Smith, Katie Couric and more celebrities wrote memoirs in 2021 — and they weren’t afraid to share some of their deepest truths.
The former Bachelorette opened up about her time on the dating show in November’s God Bless This Mess: Learning to Live and Love Through Life’s Best (and Worst) Moments, but she also wrote about family tragedy and her childhood.
“My life has been shared very openly [and] vulnerably through a lens of a television show. It’s always been for entertainment,” the former Miss Alabama exclusively told Us Weekly ahead of the book’s release. “And while a lot of that was my real life, there’s a lot of parts that fall through the cracks [and] that are filtered out. Instead of it being told through a funnel of other people, I really wanted to take the time and be able to share my story my way and the most authentic way.”
In the book, the Bachelor Nation alum revealed that her aunt LeeLee and two young cousins were brutally murdered when Brown was just 6 years old. The Alabama native decided to share the tragedy after speaking to a therapist who suggested that writing about the incident would help her process it.
“It was kind of, like, an assignment she gave me,” Brown explained to Us. “That was really hard because there was obviously a lot of emotions there. But on the other side of that, it was really healing.”
Earlier in the year, Couric detailed the aftermath of her former colleague Matt Lauer‘s firing from the Today show in November 2017. “I know Matt thinks I betrayed him, and that makes me sad,” she wrote in her October memoir, Going There. “But he betrayed me too by how he behaved behind closed doors at the show we both cared about so much.”
While promoting the book, the Virginia native said that she and the disgraced anchor have “no relationship” anymore.
“The side of Matt I knew was the side of Matt I think you all knew. He was kind, generous, considerate, a good colleague,” she recalled during an appearance on the Today show. “I think what I realized is that there was a side of Matt I never really knew. I tried to understand why he behaved the way he did, and why he was so reckless, and callous, and honestly abusive to other women.”
Keep scrolling for a look back at the best celebrity memoirs of 2021: