Starting right with the subtitle of her memoir, Melissa Joan Hart, star of Clarissa Explains It All and Sabrina The Teenage Witch, wants you to know that she is normal.  To prove it, she offers up what might just be the worst of these celebrity “tell-alls” ever produced.  Certainly the worst that I have read.  Which is a shame.

Clarissa debuted on Nickelodeon during my junior year of high school.  Clearly, I was not the target audience, but, during the summer, we would occassionally come across it, along with other classics like Hey Dude and Salute Your Shorts.  5 years later, Sabrina debuted, which I watched for most of its run on ABC.  I guess you could say I was (am?) a Melissa Joan Hart fan, so you would think her book would be right up my alley.  Sadly, she hardly touches on her experiences on these shows, glossing over most of her time on the shows and instead on who she roomed with or how she was out with her hairstylist.

The one big “scandal” that Hart was involved with was her racy Maxim cover, which wasn’t out of the ordinary for the magazine, but landed her in hot water with Archie Comics, the owner of the Sabrina property.  This whole thing is covered in about 3-4 paragraphs, while an entire chapter is devoted to her husband’s love of Alabama football.

In her attempt to tell us little people how normal she actually is, Hart succeeds in showing how out of touch she truly is.  She lists the 4 things that she is unable to do to this day, things normal girls learned as teenagers, like putting on makeup or making fashion choices, but she always had professionals to do them for her.  She could have listed a 5th, tell a compelling story in a way that makes a reader relate to her.