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Sophia Bush didn’t hold back while writing her new memoir, “And I’ll Tell You Mine.”
Although best known as an actress, Bush not only details the roles that made her famous, but also her childhood, her politics, her past
and present personal relationships, and everything in between.
“There were things that I knew were very important to talk about because they’re sort of the foundation for the lens through which I see the world, and some of those things are really beautiful, and some of those things are really hard,” she tells Variety of choosing what to cover and leave out. “I think when you go through a big journey in your life, when you finally take apart the box that society builds for you and decide you’re going to build your own, it’s impossible not to look back at everything and figure out, where did that conditioning come from? Where did I learn those patterns? What did I never process that might have gotten me here?”
She crafted the book like a rollercoaster, making sure it had the right shape. That also meant not every story could fit into the arc. “I had the experience so many writers have where you have to kill your darlings, and it’s really difficult,” she says. But she told herself, “They could go in the second one if I choose to write it.”
Bush details her experiences on “One Tree Hill” and the abuse so much of the cast allegedly experienced at the hands of Mark Schwahn in the memoir; she writes about her time on “Chicago P.D.” in a much different way, without naming anyone or getting into too many particulars, partially because the show is still on the air.
“There are 200 people that I care very much about, whose jobs are the lifeline for their families. It’s not my place to choose when to speak for other people who aren’t ready and might not ever be,” she says about the difference. “That’s part of the reason it took us so long after Wilmington. It takes people a lot of time, and I think that’s okay. I think this reaction that women aren’t allowed to speak after a certain amount of time is so strange. You see it in the manosphere and their traitorous female allies. You see Megyn Kelly critiquing the Jane Doe at Cornell. Meanwhile, Megyn Kelly didn’t speak up about her abuse at the hands of Roger Ailes for over 10 years, so it’s a very strange thing that the universe wants to do in that space in general.”
Bush notes that regardless of what details are shared, “the really important takeaway is that it’s one in three of us and that’s a conservative estimate, and that’s irrespective of industry, age, socioeconomic status. It’s just a fact of the planet, and so that’s a conversation I’m interested in having much more so than the other.”
That said, she did detail her experiences on “Chicago P.D.,” though more as a way to get it out for her own well-being. “I did write the other, and then I put it away.”
One project not covered in her book is “John Tucker Must Die,” but since Bush is still close with Brittany Snow and has recently become friends with Malin Akerman, would she consider joining “The Hunting Wives”? It’s not a no, “especially because Brittany and I in ‘John Tucker Must Die’ were everyone’s gay awakening,” she says. “How dow do we figure it out? Of course I would be thrilled, and I’m also such a fan that I’m like I don’t know if I would want the spoilers!”
For those still in her life, Bush gave a heads-up about what her memoir would include.
“With every person in the book that I am close to, obviously, I had a version of a conversation that was appropriate for that person in that relationship,” she says. She notes that for the chapters about her “One Tree Hill” experiences, she sent it to “the gaggle of girls from Wilmington” and had an open conversation.
“I said, ‘Listen, this is how I’d like to do it. This is how my journalism school-trained brain wants to do it.’ It feels very, very much like forensic reporting, which I think in the landscape of a Me Too conversation is really important,” she said. “Because 48 of us, by the end of this, went on the record about the same person, women from multiple productions saying exactly what everyone meant… that removes the knee-jerk reaction from the manosphere to say, ‘Oh, she’s exaggerating.’ No, I’m not. This is literally, exactly word for word, how everybody felt. Sometimes I think that is the most powerful thing. And so that was really special.”
And speaking of the manosphere, Bush had select words for those who went on social media with negative comments after her recent “Call Her Daddy” podcast, during which she voiced the importance of walking away from what wasn’t right for her in the past.
“This household voting manosphere Christian fascist cesspool really hates a woman who says, ‘I was unhappy, so I made a different decision,'” she says. So, for the most part, she stays offline when it comes to comments about herself. “I don’t open myself up to it because if I do, then it’s in. Nobody wants to hear a privileged entertainer say that it’s hard, but it’s actually deeply traumatizing to be met with so much vitriol all the time, especially because these platforms algorithmically surface those things.”
“And I Will Tell You Mine: Notes from a Life in Progress” is out Oct. 27.
