Jennie Garth: I Finally Learned to Love Myself

THE 90210 STAR OPENS UP LIKE NEVER BEFORE ABOUT THE TOLL OF SUDDEN FAME, HER STRUGGLES AFTER A PAINFUL DIVORCE AND HOW SHE FOUND HER WAY BACK TO HAPPINESS

- GILLIAN TELLING,DENISE CREW

In May 1995 Jennie Garth’s Beverly Hills, 90210 character Kelly Taylor was facing a conundrum: Both Dylan McKay (Luke Perry) and Brandon Walsh (Jason Priestley), the hottest guys at West Beverly Hills High, were demanding she decide between them. “I choose me,” her character told them, walking away from both. “At that age I didn’t really get it,” Garth, 54, says with a laugh. But now Garth, who in the decades after the show ended endured a painful divorce, miscarriages and mental health struggles, finally gets it. After she turned 50, “the phrase just came back to me, and it started to really resonate,” says the mom of three, who has found confidence and a new sense of purpose through speaking engagements, her I Choose Me podcast and her new memoir of the same name, out April 14. “Even though it took a while, I’m finally at a place where I’m comfortable choosing myself,” she says. “It was like a light bulb moment, realizing, ‘I have to amplify that message still, in 2026.’ ”

If it seems unlikely that someone like Garth would spend most of her life struggling with self-worth and impostor syndrome, she explains that, unlike Kelly Taylor, she didn’t grow up in Beverly Hills and certainly had no inkling that she’d one day become one the most famous teens on the planet. “I grew up on a farm in the Midwest, riding my pink Huffy dirt bike and playing with the pigs and the horses and the dogs,” she says of her “idyllic childhood” in Illinois and later Arizona. She loved dancing and was competing in a pageant in Laughlin, Nev., when her now talent manager told her she should take acting lessons. Shortly after, she moved to L.A., where she landed guest spots on shows like Growing Pains. Everything changed when