Debbie Gibson was 17 when she became the youngest woman ever to write, produce and perform a Billboard #1 hit — a record she still holds. Since then, she’s done everything from movies to Broadway to reality TV to Playboy. She talks about all of it in her new memoir, Eternally Electric: The Message in My Music, which was released Tuesday.
“What really surprised me is that I could write three more memoirs after this,” Debbie told ABC Audio ahead of the book’s release. “I mean, we all live a lot of life, right? But … I never had a year where I did nothing. Ever.”
“So when I’m going, like, year by year and I’m trying to think about, ‘What do people wanna know about?’ But what do I feel is worth sharing? … Picking and choosing, it was really hard.”
What was also difficult, Debbie notes, is how much to share without throwing other people under the bus.
“I’m protective over people, but I am candid, so finding those lines was probably the hardest thing,” Debbie says.
And since she is candid in the book, even sharing a story about the time she was so broke that *NSYNC‘s Lance Bass gave her five grand to pay her bills, Debbie wonders what fans will think of her now.
“Knowing that every time I get up on a stage, if someone has read the book, they’re now going to be seeing a version of me that they didn’t know,” she says. “They’re gonna be seeing it all, the good, the bad, the ugly.”
“It’s hard to know how I feel about that, honestly, until I’m out there and people have read it,” she says. “It’s really kind of daunting and exhilarating at the same time.”
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