Look, everybody knows Jenelle Evans has had a hard life.
It’s not even a little bit of a secret.
Some of her hardships she’s brought on herself, others have been part of the terrible hand life dealt her … the point is, girl’s had more struggles than most.
And in her new book, Read Between the Lines: From the Diary of a Teenage Mom, she’s getting extra real about those struggles.
In some new excerpts obtained by E! News, we’re learning more and more about Jenelle — about her descent into drug use, the way she lost custody to her oldest son, Jace, and more.
Remember, the book is styled with old diary entries she wrote when she was a child paired with reflections she’s written now.
In one excerpt, she references a diary entry she wrote when she was 13 years old that “says so much about me and my life then and now.”
“It is lonely. It is sad. It is rejected. I did cry myself to sleep some nights out of fear and negativity.”
We know her book also discusses the way her father abandoned her at a young age, and the issues she had (and still has) with her mother, and we can see here how much it affected her.
Jenelle adds that “I would like to say I will never cry myself to sleep again, but I know this isn’t true. No matter how much I accomplish, a secret part of me will always be this scared thirteen-year-old girl.”
“I will always feel awkward and maladjusted. I may smile at the camera, but sometimes I am dying on the inside.”
“Not always,” she acknowledges, “and not nearly as often as years ago, but the doubt and insecurities are still there.”
In another section of the book, Jenelle discusses what happened when her mother took custody of the baby she had when she was a teenager, that adorable little Jace.
Her mother, Barbara, still has custody all these years later, and it’s been a major source of contention between them.
But to hear Jenelle tell it, Babs basically tricked her into signing over custody of her baby.
“One night,” she recalls, “my mother convinced me to go out with my friends so I could relax. My mother. Wanted me to relax.”
She writes that she “should have been suspicious at the time,” because Barbara has never been “the kind of woman to encourage others to enjoy themselves.”
“I took the bait, however, and went out for the evening with Tori.”
And then, when she came home the next morning, Child Protective Services was there waiting.
“My mother had called them and told them I was out partying all night and left my son at home,” she claims.
“She told them I did this pretty much every night, which was a lie. I tried to tell them she told me to go out, but they wouldn’t listen.”
“They gave my mother temporary custody in light of my actions. My mother had set me up and I had fallen hard for it.”
So it would seem like, at least for part of her book, Jenelle forgot all about Teen Mom 2, right?
In the first season of the show, we did see Jenelle leave Jace with Barbara to go party. Many, many times.
We saw Barbara telling Jenelle that she needed to stay home with Jace, and we saw Jenelle refuse. Many, many times.
Finally, we saw the actual scene in which Jenelle agreed to give Barbara custody, and it didn’t happen at all like she describes in her book.
In yet another section of the book, she discusses a boy she calls William — her first true love, and the guy that introduced her to drugs.
“Yeah, I am not ashamed to say I tried pot for the first time,” she writes. “And the second time. And the third time.”
“When I say we stayed up all night talking, it was mostly spent smoking.”
“I have to say, I know it’s supposed to be such a horrible thing but I didn’t see what the big deal was about. I felt relaxed and happy. I liked it.”
The “big deal” was that Jenelle did like it — a whole, whole lot. That’s why she stayed out so much after giving birth to Jace, and that’s why she gave her mother custody of him.
But it’s starting to look like her book doesn’t exactly line up with reality.
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