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The Biggest Revelations From Christy Carlson Romano’s New Memoir

Watch: Christy Carlson Romano Says Childhood Fame Is “Like CTE” After Hayden Panettiere’s Death

When Christy Carlson Romano was ready to write a book about her experience with childhood fame, she thought she’d be putting together straightforward account of her life.

Instead, she ended up revisiting a lot of dark moments for her memoir Once Upon a Trainwreck: The Fall and Rise of a Child Star, and finally got some closure.

“It’s taught me that life goes by in a flash, and not just the flash of a shotgun, but the flash of time,” Romano told USA Today ahead of the Oct. 6 release, referring to the freak injury she suffered in 2025 when she was shot in the face at a Texas shooting range. “One of the things that unpacking my life did for me was really showcase just how fast it’s gone and how fast it will continue to go.”

In addition to the shooting incident, Romano details the insecurities she felt as a child actress, even while starring on the Disney Channel’s Even Stevens and Kim Possible, as well as her subsequent struggle with alcoholism and the toxic relationships she experienced before eventually meeting her husband of now-12 years, Brendan Rooney, the father of her daughters Isabella, 9, and Sophia, 7.

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Christy Carlson Romano Compares Early Fame to CTE After Hayden Panettiere’s Death

And the 42-year-old has said that her story could have taken a more tragic turn.

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When Hayden Panettiere died, Romano told the New York Times recently, “You can’t help but feel a tethering. You say to yourself, like, ‘That could have been me,’ in a weird way, like in a very quiet, subconscious way.”

Having noted on an April 2024 episode of Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown podcast that she didn’t watch the documentary Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV—which detailed allegations of abuse and mistreatment of young actors who worked on Nickelodeon shows—because it was “extremely triggering,” Romano acknowledged that she’s received some criticism for sharing the dark side of her story now.

“People want and expect me to still talk about the past,” she told the NY Times, “but only in a way that makes them comfortable.”

Read on for the biggest revelations from Romano’s memoir Once Upon a Trainwreck:

Once Upon a Trainwreck: The Fall and Rise of a Child Star

In her new memoir, Disney Channel star Christy Carlson Romano pulls back the curtain on child stardom, her picture perfect image, and the secrets she kept in the midst of Hollywood fame.

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Christy Carlson Romano’s First Commercial Audition Included Question About Being ToplessChristy Carlson Romano was 6 when she went to her first audition, for a Zest soap commercial.She recounts in her 2026 memoir Once Upon a Trainwreck that, after reading the lines, the casting director asked if Christy would be comfortable being filmed from the back with no shirt on, as the ad was set in a shower.Mom Sharon Romano (also Christy’s manager until she was 21) answered, “‘I’m sure that’s fine,'” Christy wrote, “even though I am not feeling fine about it at all. My whole body feels squirmy, like I want to run out of the room.”Christy didn’t end up booking that commercial.But the Kim Possible alum, who called her relationship with Sharon “complex” when she appeared on Special Forces in 2025, also refers to her mom multiple times in the book as her “ride or die.””Despite everything, despite all our complicated history, family shows up,” Christy wrote in one of the letters to her daughters that inform the structure of the book. “She always showed up.”

Macaulay Culkin Mooed at Christy Carlson Romano in SchoolChristy writes of attending Professional Children’s School in Manhattan while Macaulay Culkin and younger brother Kieran Culkin were also students there. She remembers the Home Alone stars hanging out with a crowd of guys who wore “Black Flag and NOFX pins on their black trench coats, or those stupid pins that say ‘Life Sucks, and Then You Die’ on their silver-graffitied black bike messenger bags.”One day, she writes, Macaulay “started mooing at me on the stairwell like a cow and seemed super out of it one day, at least to me. In my head, I can only think that he’s such a waste of talent, and I feel embarrassed that he goes to our school looking like that.”Christy notes later in the book that, when she first met him at their brother-sister chemistry read, her Even Stevens costar Shia LaBeouf reminded her of the “’punk” PCS kids, Macaulay and Kieran.”E! News has reached out to Macaulay’s rep for comment and has yet to hear back.

Scarlett Johansson Made Christy Carlson Romano NervousWhen established actress Scarlett Johansson enrolled at PCS, Christy writes, she didn’t want to be caught looking at her too much “because she’s so cool and I don’t want to seem like I’m trying too hard.”They eventually started eating lunch together with some other girls, and Scarlett attended a sleepover at her house, but Christy felt “uneasy and insecure” around the Horse Whisperer star.

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Christy Carlson Romano Had No Bond With Shia LaBeouf Off-CameraDespite being so believable playing a put-upon older sister and her obnoxious but good-hearted little brother on the Disney Channel’s Even Stevens, Christy and Shia “rarely interact off-screen,” she writes. “He barely asks about my life and I don’t ask about his. Maybe it makes the sibling rivalry feel real on the show, but in actual, everyday life, it sucks.”Overall, Christy notes, she felt that the show’s crew was “constantly trying to pit us against each other” so much that the tension between the Stevens siblings “bleeds over into real life.”

Why Christy Carlson Romano Missed Auditioning for The Princess DiariesChristy writes that Donna Pescow, who played her mom on Even Stevens, helped her run lines for her audition for “the perfect role” in The Princess Diaries, a film she envisioned being the one to break her out of TV and into movies.But she was shooting 2003’s The Even Stevens Movie at the time, and that day went long. She ended up missing her Princess Diaries audition, Christy recalls, and couldn’t reschedule it.

How She Became Christy Carlson RomanoBorn Christy Romano, that’s the name the actress stuck with when she starred on Even Stevens and Kim Possible. It wasn’t until she played Belle in Beauty and the Beast on Broadway in 2004 that she became Christy Carlson Romano, first seeing her new moniker on a billboard in Times Square.She added her mom’s maiden name to her moniker “for broader appeal” after Sharon worried that just Romano sounded “‘too ethnic,'” Christy writes in Once Upon a Trainwreck. Upon seeing it, she recalls, “I’m embarrassed by how long it is. And there it is. Looming over Times Square. It’s not even my real name, but now I’m stuck with it.”

Carley Margolis/FilmMagic

Depression Led Christy Carlson Romano to Try Self-HarmingFeeling lonely and adrift in the mid-’00s, Christy recalls being “depressed and starting to feel a little untethered.””I’ve become so numb, I’ve tried being bulimic just to feel something,” she writes, and she considers that drinking more and sleeping all day will also help her spend less money on food.At another point, she continues, “I try scraping my nails against the insides of my arms to see if I can become a cutter. No such luck. I feel like a dumbass. How was I ever someone’s role model?”

Christy Carlson Romano Says She Tried Cocaine for the First Time at Paris Hilton’s HouseChristy writes that she saw cocaine for the first time during a Halloween party at Paris Hilton‘s house and—despite having sworn to herself to never do hard drugs—she says yes when the person who brought her to the party encourages her to try it.”After getting a taste for it the first time at Paris’s party, I’ve been partying too much and trying coke more,” she writes, noting that she also saw it as a useful way to get her boyfriend to worry more about her.E! reached out to Hilton’s rep for comment but has not yet heard back.

Pregnancy Prompted Christy Carlson Romano to Seek Help for Drinking ProblemHaving been candid about her struggle with alcohol abuse, Christy writes in the book that it wasn’t until she was pregnant with her and husband Brendan Rooney‘s first child in 2016 that she admitted she had a drinking problem.She recalls telling their therapist during a counseling session, “I’m powerless over alcohol. And I need to stop.”

Instagram/Christy Carlson Romano

What Happened After Christy Carlson Romano Was Shot in the FaceChristy shared in February 2025 that she’d been shot in the eye by someone in their party who “unsafely fired in the wrong direction” while she was shooting clay pigeons with her husband in Texas.In her book, she describes catching “bird shot fragment scatter because a shotgun was fired in my direction from two hundred feet away.”She writes that she feared in the moment that she was going to die, and that her husband assumed she would lose her sight in that eye.Christy recalls asking with a laugh, “‘AM I UGLY?!'” as she also sobbed.Praising how calm her husband was driving her to the hospital with her “beloved shooter” in the backseat, Christy writes that she joked to the guy, “They say you miss one hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.”The doctor told her it missed her eye by 1 millimeter, but, she writes, “The bird shot is still in my head. The scar is still on my face. And I’m grateful for both, because they remind me to stay present.”

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