Maddie Ziegler has grown up so much, hasn’t she?
It seems like just yesterday that she was a tiny little girl, dancing her heart out on Dance Moms, but that was then, and this is now.
And now she’s 14 years old — and she’s already releasing a memoir!
Her book, titled The Maddie Diaries: A Memoir, was just released yesterday, and judging by these excerpts, it sounds like her childhood — well, the Dance Moms part of her childhood — was actually pretty rough.
“People ask me a lot if what they see on Dance Moms is real,” she writes in one segment. “Well, I can’t really answer that — I don’t watch the show.”
“I’ve probably only seen one entire episode from start to finish. I don’t love watching myself. I’ve lived through it, why do I need to watch it happen all over again?”
“I was eight years old at the time,” she continues, “and there were cameramen following me around everywhere I went. I would just ignore them and go about my business.”
Pretty mature for an 8-year-old, huh?
“Eventually,” Maddie explains, “you feel a little exposed because you’re on all the time. Your life is what the show is about, but you’re also trying to live it.”
“I just wanted to dance; I didn’t want all the drama.”
But if you’ve seen even a few seconds of Dance Moms, you know that the drama was unavoidable. From dance coach Abby Lee Miller screaming to the mothers screaming to the kids crying, drama is just as important to the show as dancing.
In another part of her book, Maddie laments that “When it came to competing, people expected us to be the best because we were the ones with the TV show.”
“That was a lot of pressure — we had a reputation to live up to.”
In addition to the pressure, there was also some danger, too — at one point, she recalls a an event at a mall when “a thousand screaming fans” were “pushing and shoving and trying to get close to us.”
“It was pretty scary,” she writes. “We actually had to hide locked in a store for a while till the crowds thinned out and the screaming stopped.”
But what about Maddie’s infamous dance instructor, Abby Lee Miller? She was a huge part of her life for several years, so there’s probably oodles of stories dedicated to her, right?
Wrong. Maddie doesn’t mention Abby one single time. Not once.
Beautiful, right?
But while she doesn’t mention Abby by name, she did write that before she met Sia, “I would say yes to a lot of things I didn’t want to do because I thought I had to — I didn’t want to disappoint anyone.”
“I’d be overwhelmed by the amount of work on my plate. Sia always tells me you have to have time off, step back and appreciate the moment.”
How lucky is it that she met Sia then? So at least she has one person in her life how who’s telling her to take some time off from dancing to be a kid.
Will you be reading Maddie’s book? If only just for the subtle Abby Lee Miller shade?