Welcome to Spreadlandia, where two veteran editors read it ALL to winnow out only the best: juicy yarns, big ideas, deeply personal essays, and hot goss—aka, the full Spread. Plus: original interviews, podcasts, and more. Come hungry!
Spreadgang,
Earlier this week as the world woke to the tragic news that Hayden Panettiere—for us, forever the curly-haired tomboy from Remember the Titans—was found dead at 36 in a South Carolina apartment, our minds went to two separate places: First, to the 11-year-old daughter Panettiere lost custody of in 2018 after suffering severe postpartum depression, anxiety, and addiction to alcohol and opioids. Second, to the reason we know so much about that very personal business: Panettiere’s memoir, released by Grand Central Publishing just this May. This Is Me: A Reckoning was an instant bestseller, and of course it was: It was full of revelations about Panettiere’s addiction, her mental health, and her sexuality, launching a raft of stories about the vicious trap of child stardom (themes that re-emerged this week).
The struggling book business relies on these hits to stay afloat. Stars bring millions of ready-made fans hungry for an “untold story”—the bigger the trainwreck, the better. And they do the publicity slog for free. As literary agent Kate McKean wrote in Bustle in 2025, celebrity memoirs “are the closest thing to a sure bet in an industry in which there are no guarantees.”
But lately it feels as if some of the widest-read celebrity memoirs aren’t just inside-baseball tell-alls by people who have walked through fire and come out the other side. They’re cries for help from people who are still very much in crisis, often published just before (or even after) the person succumbs to the very issues the book reveals. Matthew Perry’s Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing was an immediate No. 1 on the New York Times list when it was released in November 2022; it hit No.1 on Amazon again when he died, just one year later. Virginia Giuffre did not live to see the release of Nobody’s Girl, which debuted at number one when it came out in October 2025, six months after her suicide. (Giuffre had been working with a writer on the book before her death.) Lisa Marie Presley’s book is a slightly different story: It had to be finished by her daughter Riley Keough after her sudden death, and was released the following year. It’s hard to imagine that any of these people seemed exactly robust when they were inking their book contracts.
How much do publishers—or celebrity agents, negotiating deals on stars’ behalves—know about the fragility of the people whose books they agree to publish? What do they see? Are red flags being ignored? And what responsibility do they have to the people whose personal tragedies will inevitably make them a pile of money? At 7pm tonight, just as this issue pops up in your inbox, the New York Times will release its weekly book list. Will This Is Me (which has been mentioned in every write-up about Panettiere’s death that we’ve read) be back on it?
Oddly, this isn’t even the book story of the week! Natalie Portman theorists, keep reading. We’re getting there…
Rachel & Maggie
Usha is not going to make it better.
Kate Andersen Brower attempts to answer one of the great existential questions of our time in Vanity Fair: “What [in the everloving hell] Is Usha Vance Thinking?” (brackets ours). Unfortunately Brower’s write-around leaves us head-scratchin’ harder than ever, because we just cannot compute such a woman. Usha, she argues, is not some nice feminist who’s been brainwashed, hoodwinked, or bamboozled—an explanation that is somehow easier to accept than the reality: that she is the architect of JD’s success, a woman whose personal politics are ambiguous but whose marital ambitions are not. Yes, a person can be raised by a molecular biologist mother who “helped establish a pilot course on race, ethnicity, and gender in biology and medicine” at UC San Diego, yet still mold JD Vance out of wet Ohio clay into the political opportunist we fear today. At Yale, Usha made spreadsheets of all the things he needed to know (including that elitist snack, Greek yogurt) to ascend to the 5 percent. (Apparently in today’s billionaire-verse, we’ve had to cast a wider net than “1 percent” to get anywhere close to regular, run-of-the-mill wealth.) Usha’s Yale Law friends have a secret Signal chat to compare notes on how the crazy just keeps getting crazier. Somebody send us a link: We have thoughts! Read it here.
