A veteran reality television star tells all.
After 11 seasons on the Bravo network’s reality series Vanderpump Rules, Shay comes clean on her life and career in the Hollywood spotlight. Shay grew up in Southern California, “unintentionally” born to an American mother who was just 19 when she gave birth and a Mexican American father who was disinterested in being a father. A self-confessed people-pleaser, she gushes about being a studious overachiever in school, juggling theater roles and sporting events, and focusing on elevating her appearance (“I was giving Kylie Jenner before she was a glimmer in Kris’s eye”), all despite harrowing instances of bullying and feeling the need to cloak her Mexican heritage. In college, Shay participated in a class-action lawsuit against Hooters, accusing a general manager of filming her (and several other women) in a changing area. A broadcast journalism degree couldn’t prepare her for a new life in Hollywood, partaking in hookups with married actor Eddie Cibrian and a host of others, and the ensuing tabloid-fodder melodrama that would follow her into her breakout role on reality television—where, she divulges, filmed material was “edited and packaged for the masses.” Her eventual role, at 26, as a cast member on the restaurant business series Vanderpump Rules put Shay on the star trajectory she had longed for. But the friendship betrayals, relationship troubles, fertility challenges, miscarriages, and OCD episodes, all delivered with breathless urgency, took their toll. Now, at 40, she acknowledges feeling the need to branch out in her acting career and focus on her OCD advocacy and motherhood. Effervescent throughout, Shay doesn’t skimp on the insider details and is a naturally engaging storyteller, sharing the mostly amusing anecdotes of her on- and off-camera life with candor, youthful charm, wit, and gratitude for her fame and the many joys (and pains) it’s brought to her life thus far.
Shay’s fan base and Bravo junkies will garner the most from this harmlessly frothy confessional.