Virtue scores
Review
SECTION ONE Hayden Panettiere was seventeen when Heroes made her a household face, and by her mid-thirties she had lived through postpartum depression, a public custody battle, addiction, and the slow work of putting herself back together. This is Me is her account of all of it — the parts that looked effortless from the outside and the parts that very nearly broke her. The book asks what it costs to grow up in public and whether it is possible to know who you actually are when the world decided who you were before you finished high school. Panettiere writes for readers who have watched someone they admired collapse and wondered what was really happening, and for readers who have done some collapsing of their own and need to hear that the story does not end there. The title is both a declaration and a question, and the book earns the ambiguity. SECTION TWO - **Created**: The memoir's insistence on naming the person behind the persona is an implicit argument for the dignity of the individual self. Panettiere refuses to let the roles she played — cheerleader, ingénue, tabloid subject — exhaust who she is. This is the logic of the imago Dei expressed narratively: no external image, however persistent, can fully capture or finally diminish the person. - **Fallen**: The book's treatment of addiction and postpartum depression is where the Fallen state of the CCMMP comes into sharpest focus. Panettiere does not describe these as random misfortunes but as disorders that shaped her choices and damaged her relationships in traceable ways. This is concupiscence as Aquinas understood it — not merely weakness but a disordering of appetite that, left unnamed, compounds. The memoir names it. - **Fallen (trauma and embodiment)**: The account of postpartum depression is especially significant because it refuses to separate the body's suffering from the self's disorientation. The body was not incidental to what happened to her; the body was where it happened. The CCMMP's insistence on the unity of body and soul finds an unexpected mirror here. - **Redeemed**: The arc of the book is not triumphalist recovery but the slower, less legible process of reorientation — choosing differently, incrementally, without certainty of outcome. This is closer to what the Catholic tradition means by conversion than to the sudden transformation of popular testimony. The healing is partial, ongoing, and costly, which makes it more credible as an image of what redemption looks like in ordinary life. - **Prudence (memory and personal wisdom)**: The memoir functions as an extended exercise in what Aquinas identifies as the first integral part of prudence: the honest recollection of past experience as material for present judgment. Panettiere goes back through her history not to relitigate it but to understand what she was actually doing and why, which is the beginning of practical wisdom. SECTION THREE Gabor Mate[^1], writing in In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, argues that the addict's core confusion is between the circumstances of a life and the life itself — 'I no longer confuse stuff that happens with my life' is exactly the distinction Panettiere's recovery tries to relearn. Hayes[^2], in Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life, structures that same reorientation as a deliberate inventory of pain, asking readers to 'write down what plagues you and causes you pain' rather than avoid it — Panettiere's memoir is, in effect, that inventory made public narrative. Where Hayes offers the inventory as a therapeutic tool and Mate locates the wound in developmental attachment, the CCMMP would situate both within the Fallen arc and press further: the question is not only what disordered the appetite but toward what rightly ordered desire is finally directed. ## References 1. Mate, Gabor (n.d.). *In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts*. — "I no longer confuse stuff that happens with my life. This moment is okay, even when things are coming apart at the seams." 2. Hayes, Steven (n.d.). *Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life*. — "write down what plagues you and causes you pain. Be honest and thorough and create your suffering inventory."
✓ Strengths
- ✓The memoir's frank account of navigating fame from childhood forward affirms the dignity of the person beneath the celebrity image, resisting the reduction of the self to public performance.
- ✓Panettiere's willingness to name specific failures — addiction, broken relationships, postpartum depression — models the kind of truthful self-accounting that Catholic moral psychology recognizes as a precondition for genuine healing.
- ✓The arc of the book moves from disorder toward recovery, giving concrete narrative shape to the redeemed state: not as an abstract resolution but as a daily, contingent practice of choosing differently.
- ✓The memoir trains the reader's memory of past experience as a faculty of practical wisdom — what Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae I-II calls the first integral part of prudence — by dwelling on what went wrong and what gradual reorientation looked like.
- ✓Panettiere's account of postpartum depression and its aftermath treats the body's suffering as morally and spiritually meaningful rather than merely clinical, implicitly honoring the unity of body and soul that the CCMMP places at the center of Catholic anthropology.
⚠ Considerations
- ⚠The therapeutic and recovery framework the memoir inhabits is largely secular; the resources named for healing are professional and relational rather than sacramental or explicitly ordered toward transcendence, which leaves the Redeemed arc incomplete from a Catholic anthropological standpoint.
- ⚠The memoir's treatment of disordered desire — particularly around substances and relational attachment — risks framing recovery as self-authorship rather than as participation in a healing that exceeds the self, which can inadvertently reinforce a voluntarist anthropology.
- ⚠Readers seeking an account of how suffering is transformed rather than merely survived may find the book offers honest testimony without a sufficiently robust telos — the 'this is me' of the title can read as arrival rather than as a way-station in ongoing conversion.