Melissa Explains It All

Get inside the mind of Clarissa and Sabrina the Teenage Witch as Melissa Joan Harts reveals the details of her life in Melissa Explains It All: Tales From My Abnormally Normal Life. As someone who can recite entire episodes of Sabrina the Teenage Witch from memory and actually named her black cat Salem, despite the fact that she is a female cat, I can’t believe I waited this long to read this book. Actually, I listened to it on audiobook, which I highly recommend, because Melissa Joan Hart narrates it herself.

This isn’t your stereotypical celebrity memoir because while Melissa Joan Hart may love a good shot of tequila and have done ecstasy once or twice, she doesn’t quite have the crazy post-child actor life that others have. She’s been married to her husband, her only marriage, for fourteen years. She never had to go to rehab. She never got arrested for drunk driving or ended up on the front page of a tabloid for a sex scandal with a director. Instead, her craziest moments were stumbling home drunk and getting stuck on an island and causing a scene in the airport security line with a sex toy.

While I didn’t learn any new secrets about the making of Sabrina the Teenage Witch (she and Harvey never had a secret, torrid love affair), I learned a lot about Melissa Joan Hart’s upbringing in a large family and her dedication to acting from a young age. She didn’t just appear as Clarissa on Nickelodeon one Friday and take off from there. She did commercials as a child and a lot of theater in New York and auditioned for a lot of shows she didn’t get, like Punky Brewster!

This is the perfect book for people who love Melissa Joan Hart as an actress and want to feel like you know her as a friend. She’s a lot more normal than I ever expected, and that’s honestly kind of refreshing. Listening to her talk for seven hours, the length of the audiobook, made me want to rewatch all seven seasons of Sabrina the Teenage Witch and become her best friend, even if she is my mom’s age.