Thanks to her charming turns in Mrs. Doubtfire and Matilda, Mara Wilson became one of the most beloved child stars of the ’90s – but the actress says the pressures of a “toxic,” image-obsessed industry were so heavy she had to retire as a tween.

“I’ve had people tell me, ‘The way that you judge yourself, looks-wise, is on this really strange level.’ Well, it’s because I grew up in Hollywood,” Wilson, now 29, tells PEOPLE. “I had good experiences there, but I always knew there were girls much prettier than I was, and I knew that I was always competing with them. That has followed me my whole life.

The one-time scene-stealer is now chronicling her rise to (and escape from) the spotlight in her witty debut memoir, Where Am I Now?: True Stories of Girlhood and Accidental Fame – and PEOPLE has an exclusive excerpt and interview in the magazine’s new issue.

But by the time she’d hit puberty around the turn of the millennium, “I wasn’t getting any parts,” Wilson writes in Where Am I Now? (out Sept. 13).

“Something didn’t make sense – at least until I was called for a role in a pilot. I would be auditioning for the ‘fat girl,’ ” Wilson writes.

It was shortly after that audition that Wilson – whose mother Suzie died of cancer when Wilson was 8 – decided with her dad she would begin to focus on school instead of acting.

“I realized, ‘I don’t fit their idea of what a Hollywood actress looks like, so there’s no room for me here,’ ” says Wilson. “It’s hard to come out of that sane and without some serious doubts about yourself.”

Wilson discovered a passion for theater and writing in high school and college, but those doubts continued to haunt her.

She saw her onetime friends and peers, such as Lacey Chabert, Hilary Duff, Scarlett Johansson and Kristen Stewart, on magazine covers.

“Even though part of me knew I wouldn’t go back to film acting, sometimes I wished I’d be in an accident where I’d injure my nose and jaw so I could get reconstruction guilt-free,” Wilson writes. “As I saw it, I had three choices: get cosmetic surgery and go out on auditions for the cute and funny best friend characters, stay the way I was and go out for the meager character actor roles for young women, or accept myself and give up the idea of a Hollywood film acting career for good.”

Since graduating college, Wilson has made a name for herself in the New York comedy and storytelling scene.

“Things have gotten a lot better since I left Hollywood – a great weight lifted,” Wilson says.

These days, she lives with her two cats, Milo and Theo, in Queens, where she writes comedy.

Wilson came out as bisexual following the Orlando gay nightclub massacre in June.

And she’s aware her book is putting her back in the public eye. “This time,” she says, “it’s on my terms.”


www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/...matilda-famous

“I did want to set the record straight on what had happened to me,” she admits. “If you see somebody in movies when they’re young, and then they seem to disappear, you wonder what happened to them. I wonder what happened to them.”

And what happened to Mara Wilson was, well, a lot of things. Her mother died. She was bullied in school. She struggled with the meaning of God and religion. She was diagnosed with O.C.D. She went to N.Y.U., where she wrote plays and avoided other child star co-eds Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen and Haley Joel Osment. (“We were like, ‘We can't be friends because this will be too weird,’” she laughs.) And she “broke up” with Hollywood.

The trouble started at 13, when Wilson morphed from cute, precocious kid to “weird, nerdy, loud girl with bad teeth and bad hair whose bra strap was always showing.” It was an awkward time for Wilson, as it is for most people—but unlike most people, Wilson wasn’t allowed to be an adolescent mess. She was supposed to transform effortlessly from adorable to pretty, mature, and confident. She wasn’t that girl though. So she started losing parts to the girls, who even at the most vulnerable times in their lives, could be that girl, and are still that girl.

“I was friends with girls like Hilary Duff and Lacey Chabert, and they were always incredibly beautiful, and I was like, ‘O.K., that’s them, and this is me. I don’t look like that, but I’ve got my own thing going on,’” Wilson says. “But it still mattered. You still needed to look a certain way. That was definitely hard.”
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After experiencing rejection on such a massive scale decades ago, Wilson has come to thrive, ironically, in the very place nasty little judgy people live: Twitter. At first, she was reluctant to join the site: “I was like, ‘Hey, I was pithy and witty before this came along.’” Soon, though, Wilson found a niche by not just tweeting her own bon mots, but also re-tweeting the witty commentary of others.

“I wanted to draw more attention to other people’s things, to other people’s work, and to amplify their voices,” she says.

So after Hollywood, after Twitter, after the book, after everything, is Mara Wilson nervous about coming back into the limelight for good? Is Mara Wilson ready to be . . . re-famous?

She pauses for a second. “I think that I kind of know how to do it now. Obviously, I’m not going to be Jennifer Lawrence famous or something like that,” she says. “Hopefully I can make sure to make a living at this—but it feels much better this time around.”