Getting Naked

Actress and television personality Valerie Bertinelli, known for her roles on One Day at a Time and Hot in Cleveland, offers a memoir of emotional reckoning undertaken in her mid-sixties. The book traces her efforts to confront suppressed pain, including childhood sexual abuse, two divorces, job loss, body shame, and a family history of secrecy, as she works toward genuine self-acceptance.

Bertinelli opens with a scene shortly after her 64th birthday: She stood naked before a full-length mirror, taking in her whole self. Despite years of self-improvement, she recognized she was not at peace. She identifies what she calls six stages of trying to love herself, from judgment through dieting and frustration to healthy acceptance that her body is not the problem, and finally the realization that more work remains. Voices in her head urged her to confront self-loathing, anger, and vulnerability. This time, she listened.

The narrative begins with daily walks with her rescue dog, Luna, prompted by a close friend's near-fatal car accident. At the time, Bertinelli's life had stalled: Her second marriage was ending, her Emmy-winning cooking show Valerie's Home Cooking had been canceled, and she worried about money. On these walks, she listened to birds, talked aloud to herself, and processed anger. When she heard the sound of her thighs rubbing together, a detail a former friend had once cruelly pointed out, she laughed, marking a breakthrough in self-acceptance.

Bertinelli uses the recurring dilemma of whether to color her gray roots as a lens into questions of identity. She traces how scrutiny of her appearance was instilled early: Her father compared her figure unfavorably to a cousin's, and a teacher placed a hand on her stomach and told her to watch it. During the COVID-19 lockdown, she let the gray grow and shifted from asking how she looked to asking how she felt. She grieved Ed Van Halen, her first husband, who died in 2020, as well as her parents and the end of her second marriage. After lockdown, she was not yet ready to go fully gray, recognizing the choice was less about vanity than about the little girl inside her who still needed to be understood.

Through family photo albums and a gallery wall of photographs, Bertinelli reconstructs her family history. Her parents married young after her mother became pregnant at 17. Her father, Andy Bertinelli, was loving but judgmental, with a temper that erupted unpredictably. Bertinelli reveals that her parents had a son, Mark, who died at 17 months after accidentally drinking poison. Her mother never spoke of Mark until Bertinelli was pregnant with Wolfie, her and Ed's son. After Andy's death in 2016, letters revealed that the family's grandfather had left a wife and son in Italy before starting a new family in America. Bertinelli reflects on how her parents' secrecy shaped her difficulty with trust and works toward forgiving them as people who did their best.

Bertinelli recounts menopause as a personal "climate change," connecting her confusion about her first hot flash to her mother's lifelong silence about bodily changes. On Hot in Cleveland, she and her costars, including Betty White, openly discussed their symptoms. After about eight years, she emerged stronger, stopped weighing herself daily, divorced her second husband, and began EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), a therapy that uses sensory stimulation to process traumatic memories.

Her journey to sobriety begins with a Dry January in 2023. She had been using alcohol to numb the pain of her divorce, listing six to seven drinks per week on a medical form while suspecting the true number was far higher. After completing the dry month, one night out with a martini left her feeling dull and achy. She extended her sobriety through 2024 and beyond, noticing released weight, better sleep, and greater presence. More significantly, sobriety forced her to sit with uncomfortable feelings. At a dinner with friends, she surprised herself by declaring, "I'm a damn good catch" (74).

The cancellation of her cooking show after 14 seasons and two Emmy Awards felt like a personal rejection. In the aftermath, she wrote books, kept walking, stayed sober, and continued therapy. A turning point came when she appeared on The Drew Barrymore Show and felt an immediate connection with Drew Barrymore. She was invited to join the fifth season as part of "Drew's Crew," the show's on-air team of contributors, and told to "Be you. Just be Valerie" (106). Being valued for her authentic self proved deeply healing.

In the title chapter, Bertinelli recounts a spontaneous night of skinny-dipping. On a warm summer evening, she dove naked into her pool and felt buoyant, weightless, and unjudged. She contrasts this with a history of body hatred: dieting into a bikini for a Jenny Craig weight-loss campaign, stepping on the scale daily while avoiding the mirror. She began a morning practice of looking directly into her own eyes. Gradually she saw layers of herself: her mother, her grandmother Angelina, and finally herself. She posted an underwear selfie on social media with a message about self-acceptance, and the post went viral. She recognizes that getting naked means stripping away the stories, masks, and shame she has carried her whole life. Looking in the mirror, she glimpsed the scared little girl inside and promised, "I'll come get you. We'll walk together. I'll protect you" (137).

She also underwent a painful series of surgeries to remove decades-old breast implants after one ruptured in a fall. The ordeal reinforced her understanding that chasing external fixes only delays confronting internal shame.

An unexpected crush on Metallica's lead singer, James Hetfield, at a concert in Amsterdam reignited Bertinelli's awareness that she still had desire, shifting her from believing she was done with love to wondering whether romance remained possible.

The book's emotional core arrives when Bertinelli reveals she was sexually abused at age 11, a secret she carried for over five decades. She does not name the perpetrator, stating that what matters is the effect: fear, shame, guilt, self-blame, perfectionism, and people-pleasing. Recurring dreams of a house with doors she refused to open reflected the trauma locked in her mind. Her deepest fear was that if anyone knew, she would be unlovable. After her therapist pressed gently for months, she finally spoke the truth aloud. Through EMDR therapy, she returned to the safe room in her mind and sat beside the little girl she once was. "I'm so sorry," she told her, and promised, "I won't let it happen again" (188). When she opened her eyes, tears flooded out along with a fragile sense of relief. She invokes Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel to frame her resilience: The abuse happened, and yet she is still here; it brought pain, and yet she has known connection, joy, and love.

In the closing chapters, Bertinelli takes stock. When a friend asked which period represents her best self, she answered: right now. She is wiser, more confident, and less burdened by self-doubt than at any prior stage. Among responses to a social media post marking two years of healing, one stands out: "You're perfect the way you are, Ma!" (178). On a trip to Paris, she began chanting a mantra about patience and peace, finding feathers in her path that she took as signs from the universe. She closes by urging readers to do their own hard work, free themselves from shame, and recognize that they are "imperfectly perfect, a masterpiece" (219).