A few years ago, Jennie Garth was feeling lost. Her three daughters were growing up – her eldest had already left home – and Garth was bored and unfulfilled. In March 2023, she noted in her diary that potential acting jobs were “few and far between, if at all really”. She rarely heard from her agent, and she didn’t want to get in touch with him “just to hear how different the business has become, how they just aren’t looking for a woman my age, with my stereotyped abilities”. As an actor, and one who had been particularly typecast, she was used to rejection, she wrote, “but this is getting a little scary”.

In the 90s, Garth had been a TV superstar. She was 18 when the teen drama Beverly Hills, 90210 came out, in which she played Kelly Taylor – rich and spoilt on the surface, traumatised underneath. Although she continued to work after it came to an end in 2000, not least on the show’s spin-offs, it must be hard to have hit your career high in your first job. More fulfilment came from other areas in Garth’s life – she loved motherhood – although she found the end of her marriage to her daughters’ father, the actor Peter Facinelli, so traumatic that she ended up in hospital after an accidental overdose and had a spell in rehab.

Approaching 50, Garth had a vantage point on her life, and had that classic midlife thought: is this it? “I was feeling stuck and I thought, how am I going to get out of this?” she says. “What do I do next, and how will I know what I’m meant to do?” There was also a new sense of urgency. Garth’s 90210 co-star, and first love, Luke Perry, died in 2019, and Shannen Doherty, another co-star, had been diagnosed with breast cancer and died in 2024. “There’s that sense of mortality. Having it happen around me made me feel like it was time to do what I know I’m here to do,” says Garth.

Having had a lot of therapy, and read a lot of self-help books, she realised that perhaps her purpose lay in sharing what she’d learned with other women experiencing a similar standstill. She launched a podcast, and now a book – part memoir, part self-help – both named I Choose Me. It’s the line – iconic to those of us who watched 90210 – when Kelly has to choose between the show’s two hunks, Brandon and Dylan, and she declares a third option: “Me.” It looked as if she was about to have a feminist awakening of self-discovery, but by the next episode she was still messing about with one of them. Still, we all do inadvisable things when we’re young.

Although she danced and sang as a child – she was discovered by a Hollywood manager at a beauty pageant her mother had entered her into – Garth never intended to become an actor. She grew up on a farm in Illinois, the youngest of seven, where her parents, both teachers, built their own house on their eight hectares (20 acres) of land. It was a childhood of animals, and riding her bike in the woods. “I didn’t know this world whatsoever when I entered into it,” she says – we’re on a video call, Garth in her podcast studio at home in Los Angeles. “That was like a crash course in survival, just seeing what was going on around me and trying to keep speed with that, but also be discerning about whether I wanted to be involved in certain things.”

Beverly Hills, 90210 was the first massive teen drama hit and influential on every other one that followed. It made its stars, including Doherty, Perry and Jason Priestley, hugely famous. What does that do to someone that age? “It really does screw with your mind,” says Garth, who is now 54. “I felt like I spent a good 20 years of my life, the 10 of the show and the 10 after, just trying to keep my head above water.” She thinks she avoided the worst of the effects – the partying, the wild times – by spending most weekends at the ranch she bought, two hours north of LA, which her parents moved to.

But the experience of spending her formative years on a TV show was a weird way to grow up. “I felt, developmentally, I was held back from the realities of the world,” she says. “Even though I was trying to have normal relationships and a normal life, I didn’t know how.” She watched other people leave school, go to college – slow steps towards independence. “Whereas I was slammed into it at 18. I think famous people really don’t realise the effect it has on them, because that becomes normal to them, but once you get to the other side, and maybe slow down a little, you realise: ‘My young adulthood was not normal.’ And then you start to ask questions: is what I didn’t, or did, learn what caused those bumps in my life, five, 10 years later?”

It has felt like catching up, she says. “I finally feel like I am my age now, as far as my ability to handle whatever comes my way, to not be so affected by everything.”

As a young actor, Garth wasn’t ever “in a position of grave concern”, she says, but the sexism was unavoidable. “Girls my age on every set in the 90s were exposed to far more than they should – more sexualisation, more discrimination.” What did that look like? “Boys being treated a different way than the girls on the show, different salaries. There were no expectations on the boys to be in a bathing suit, or look a certain way or always be perfect.” Had she spoken up, she says, “I can imagine I would have been labelled as something. Those weren’t conversations that women were having yet, standing up for themselves and using their voice when they needed to.”

There were unspoken expectations. “If you wanted this job, you had to look a certain way, you had to maintain what was deemed sexy or cute or beautiful to whoever the men were that were hiring us,” Garth says. She would starve herself, or take diet pills, and at 24, she had a breast enhancement. As a mother of young women now, she says, “I think, ‘Oh my God no, you absolutely are not getting a boob job at 24,’ like, let’s talk about why you want it, dig into those feelings of inadequacy, and explore it more.”

It’s obvious why she felt like that as a young actor. “You are judged constantly. You’re selected or not, and it’s hard to not take things personally. You have to be able to think: what are your real, true priorities in life? I did not know I needed to do that. I just felt there’s something wrong with me, or I’m not good enough.” The pressure, she says, in her mind became all about competition. “You have to fight to get the prize – and a lot of times back then, the prize was attention from men, acceptance from men and a job from men.”

One of the negative impacts, when she saw everyone as competition, was on her ability to form female friendships. The show, and then the media, pitted Garth and Doherty’s characters against each other, which started blurring into real-life drama. “In me, it affected that need to fight harder. I think any two women in that position could probably share the same story back then, when there were no conversations about sisterhood. Really sitting down and talking to each other, like, ‘Can you believe all this BS? I like you, you like me. It’s so weird that it’s changing our relationship, but let’s not let that happen.’ But we were just young, and we didn’t have those words.” Later, they did become friends, “outside of all that ridiculousness”.

Garth has worked solidly – she spent four years in the sitcom What I Like About You, made TV movies, did a reality show and has done several 90210 spin-offs – but she writes about feeling like an outsider in Hollywood, despite, or rather because of, her early success. “We were so beloved by our audience, but in the industry we were kind of overlooked. I think there was some incredible work done by many of the actors, heavy storylines, but I think we fell into a sort of Aaron Spelling-night-time-soapy category and I don’t think people within the industry were that open for us to grow into what could be next. It’s kept me feeling like there’s Hollywood and then there’s my career.”

Then Garth switches into self-coaching mode. “But I can see feeling separate is probably just my feelings.” At industry events, she says, “I have to actually remind myself, ‘I deserve to be here. I am just like that person and that person, and this is my industry, these are my peers.’ I have to really talk myself into feeling comfortable.” But she’s also reached a point where she wants to be more choosy. “I think a lot of [career success] comes down to opportunities for the right projects that will carry you into something next. That’s why I’ve really put the brakes on doing acting that doesn’t feel like it’s going to take me somewhere.”

Garth recently talked on her podcast about auditioning for the hit TV series White Lotus, exactly the kind of show that takes its cast onwards and upwards. For actors, especially, it must be hard to have other people’s successes in your face – literal billboards, sometimes. The job that went to someone else that then won them an Oscar; someone’s endless blockbusters, or highbrow releases. How does she deal with that? “It’s not easy,” says Garth. “You fall into that compare/despair mentality.” She smiles. “I can dip right back into it at any moment. My brain is hardwired to feel, ‘Why didn’t I get that role? I must not be good enough.’ I think that’s universal for a lot of humans out there, whether it’s a job they didn’t get, or relationship that didn’t work out, a multitude of things. We believe those negative messages in our brains, and I’ve had to learn how to untangle them, acknowledge that they’re there, but I have to control them, because nobody else is going to.”

Garth shares many of her lessons – on gaining validation from within, on dealing with uncertainty, overthinking and impostor syndrome – in her book. They’re not necessarily revelatory if, like me, you’ve spent far too long reading self-help; but framed in Garth’s warm way, they’re all good reminders. It’s helpful to see, by her account, that it’s never too late – her 50s, she decided, were a time not to slow down but to speed up.

Life looks very different now from 2012, when her 11-year marriage to Facinelli ended. (She had previously been married, to the musician Daniel B Clark, from 1994 to 1996.) On the day she ended up in hospital having her stomach pumped, she and Facinelli had been in Phoenix, Arizona, seeing a couples therapist – she thought they were there to save their marriage, but soon concluded that her husband was there to end it. She walked out, checked into her hotel room, raided the minibar, swallowed a load of anxiety pills, then made a worrying phone call to a friend. Garth’s assistant immediately flew out to Arizona, gained access to her room and found Garth unconscious on the floor.

After she was discharged from hospital, Garth entered rehab (she had been self-medicating with alcohol for months), then did several weeks of intense therapy. “I wasn’t at a place in my life where I had the kind of mind control that I do now, or the kind of knowledge of how to survive deep pain like that, so I made some unhealthy decisions and things I regret.”

For years, she says she felt ashamed – especially of how it affected her daughters – but not now. “I don’t carry that shame around. And also, nobody’s looking at me and shaming me, not my children, not my husband, not my friends, and that’s all that really matters to me. You have to forgive yourself and realise that we all make mistakes, we all have to learn the tough lessons one way or another.”

It took Garth almost a decade to fully recover from the end of her marriage to Facinelli. She laughs now. “Like, when is this going to go away? It would affect all the parts of my life, these feelings of being unwanted or having not been enough for someone, or feelings of failure – I’ve failed my children, I’ve ruined their lives.” She describes her decision to let go of her hurt and anger as like flicking a switch. “I just reached a point where I thought: I don’t want to live my life like this.”

Life got better, though not, of course, in a fairytale way. She met her third husband, the actor David Abrams, and they seem happy, although they separated for a year early in their relationship amid the pain of failed IVF and miscarriages. During that time, she did more therapy, took trips, embraced Buddhism. “I was on a bender to find happiness and joy within myself, and so everything I could read, everything I could do, all kinds of different therapies. Healers, even though that sounds crazy, just trying it and not expecting anything, but seeing what that opened up in me.” She laughs. It has brought her to some strange places. This sounds, she acknowledges, “very LA woo-woo, but I believe in angels. I really do believe that there are spirits or energies that are guiding us and supporting us.”

Even just saying it out loud is part of no longer caring what other people think as much, she says. “This is my life. I’m going to believe what I want to believe in. It’s working for me.” The benefit of being older, she says, is that, “you lose that need to be liked, that need to please people around you all the time, and there’s something so freeing in that.” She remembers that at one particularly low point her sister, trying to psych her up, told her, “You’re Jennie fucking Garth!” She laughs. “I was, like, oh God, don’t say that. It felt like a weird fame thing, but I say that to [non-famous] people now, just to remind them you are who you are, with so much beauty and power and uniqueness in that.”