A behind the scenes look at AtM,told through the eye opening experiences of the author who was a contestant.So well written an inside look at her experience really interesting.#netgalley #crown

I really enjoyed this book and I’m generally not a huge fan of non-fiction/biographies. I used to watch ANTM all the time and watched several seasons including this one. It was crazy to hear how bad it really was behind the scenes. I think this was so well written too and included positive memories so it wasn’t just this totally negative book. It flowed really well and maintained my interest. I would highly recommend if you were a fan of the show. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Fun book.
Thanks to author, publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book. While I got the book for free it had no bearing on the rating I gave it.

Like many a Millennial, I was OBSESSED with America’s Next Top Model in the early-late aughts. Not even close to being tall enough to ever even consider being a model myself, I loved living vicariously through the lives of the reality show’s aspiring models as they took part in outrageous photo shoots, underwent dramatic makeovers, and were eliminated from the competition one by one. However, behind any good TV show is an even better sordid story of what really went on behind the scenes.

Enter Sarah Hartshorne’s scathing memoir, You Wanna Be on Top?, chronicling her time spent in pursuit of the elusive ANTM title during Cycle 9 of the infamous series. Since America’s Next Top Model’s demise in 2018, stories have come out about the true and horrid conditions the girls lived through during their time on the show, so I absolutely could not wait to get my hands on a copy of Hartshorne’s memoir about my favorite guilty pleasure TV series.

To say that I read this memoir in one sitting would not be an exaggeration. I was glued to the pages of this book, and was shocked and surprised to discover what really goes into making a hit TV series. Being that it is 2025 and the truth has come out about so many celebrities’ lives and careers, you would think that I had heard it all, but this bombshell of a book still had me gripping the pages over the absurdity of it all.

One of the things that surprised me the most is how controlled the girls’ communication and interactions with each other were. There were more times than I could count where the contestants were “put on ice,” forced to sit in the same room with each other, but not permitted to speak for fear that the cameras might miss a juicy or scandalous moment. The girls never had any sense of time or direction, as they were not permitted clocks, the Internet, phones, or TV, and the van in which they were shuttled from photoshoot, to contest, to elimination had its windows covered, never allowing the girls a glimpse of outside, much less a breath of fresh air. Little attention or care was given to the models’ sleep, nutritional, mental, or emotional needs, and they were essentially treated as a means to an end … the end being great TV.

Utterly compulsive and irresistible, You Wanna Be on Top? is a book that we did not know we needed, but is everything we wanted. Anyone who was ever a fan of ANTM MUST. READ. THIS. BOOK! I promise that it does not disappoint.

I really enjoyed this behind the scenes look at Sarah's life and experience on America's Next Top Model. Written in an wry, self-deprecating voice, this was a fun, enjoyable read for me.

Thank you Netgalley and Crown Publishing for the ARC!

I have no shame.

I revel in bad reality competition shows. How bad? I remember things like ‘Who want’s to marry Harry’ and ‘Who’s your Daddy?’ with nostalgic fondness. I believe people should sashay away and not be there to make friends.

And, yes, I adored America’s Next Top Model – toxicity and all.

This is a memoir from a plus size (who, my god was not large) model on the show, so it gives a slightly different perspective than you might get from most of the contestants. And the read made me almost feel actually guilty for enjoying the show! My goodness, what these poor models were put through.

This is absolutely unvarnished and most of the people behind the show come off like the parasites they likely are. I’m also now more enthralled with Miss Jay, who clearly treated the contestants with kindness and respect.

I do think this book is very much for the folks who have watched the show. If you’re just in the ‘kind of familiar’ camp, you may not get quite the satisfaction out of it.

I’m glad the author wrote the book…and really sorry for everything they put her through.

• ARC via Publisher

I think this was an insightful portrayal of what the behind the scenes was on ANTM. I stopped watching in the earlier seasons because they made girls compromise their values and put them in terrible situations. While it dragged a little here and there, it was written very well and was an inside window for anyone wanting an inside view.

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for a fair review.

This was rather hard to read at the start simply because they treated these girls so unbelievably terribly. I honestly think Tyra and the entire production team should be charged with crimes or at the very least forced to finally pay the contestants something (and a lot, honestly). It was an eye opening look into a franchise that so many of us followed for so long. And I’m now quite annoyed that Hulu has something like 15 seasons and skips season 9 so I can’t watch it now after reading all the behind the scenes dirt here. Guess I’ll be searching YouTube….

I read a digital copy of this book via netgalley for review.

As a former huge fan of ANTM, I was so excited to see that Sarah had written a book about her experience. I remember watching Cycle 9, not only as it aired weekly but also in marathons after the full cycle had aired. I remembered being particularly bothered by how things had gone for her and wondered "if that's what we saw... how much worse went unseen?" Sarah told her story, and the stories of others, in an engaging and honest way. I truly felt for her and the other girls. I was excited when she experienced triumph and my heart went out to her when she experienced heartbreak. Even though I knew the basic plot of the book from the show, never once did I feel bored or like I already knew what was about to be said next. I recommend this book to anyone who grew up watching ANTM and dreamed of walking for Tyra and the judges.

While I liked this book it feels like at times it dragged but I also understand this is Sarah’s story and I really loved how great of a storyteller the author is

Thank you to NetGalley for allowing me to read this in exchange for an honest review.

This was a better-written read than I expected or than the cover might lead you to believe. I used to love ANTM and knew I had to read this one for nostalgia’s sake. We know now how problematic the show was, so it was interesting to read about Tyra and some behind the scenes info. I would have loved for the author to talk about more cycles besides her own, like the infamous “ethnicity switching” shoot, etc. but overall really interesting.

I think this was very informative for fans of the show who watched it religiously when it was on the air. I thought they maybe took three weeks to shoot an entire season - I was shocked that it actually took months, and that filming was as long as it was! What did the judges really have to deliberate about for hours? Why keep the contestants waiting so long?

Anyway, I could engage more with the content in this review, but I really appreciated the author's vulnerability, and hope to see more dialogues like this come out in the realm of reality television.

This is great for fans of America's Next Top Model! It dives into the history and behind the scenes.

I don't usually do one-liners (or one-ish-liners), but this calls for one: If you watched ANTM back in the day and still think about it sometimes, read this book. Skip the reviews and go straight for the book. Just do it.

Oh gosh. This book. This SHOW. America's Next Top Model is possibly the first show of which I watched entire seasons—it was the mid-2000s, I was in boarding school, and there was a television in the hall lounge. (Television wasn't a thing at home, hence not really having watched most other shows.) ANTM was still new (cycle 2 when I entered boarding school), and my dorm was OBSESSED. The contestants seemed so glamorous, and at that point Tyra Banks still seemed mostly sane. We were young and we were dumb—like, really nerdy and book-smart, but also really dumb—and for a while when cycle 3 or 4 was airing we tried to talk the tallest, thinnest girl on hall into sending in an audition tape. (Fortunately, she was also possibly the shyest girl on hall, so she sensibly ignored us.)

Hartshorne's season (cycle 9) aired when I was in college, and I know I was still watching—I know I watched the entirety of her season—though I can't remember if it was a watch-on-the-dorm-TV thing or a watch-on-my-laptop thing. It's been years since I've been able to stomach even a snippet of Tyra Banks talking, and all of the seasons blend together, and when I looked up Hartshorne and the various other contestants she mentions I went "oh yeah, I remember her", and then I had to look them all up again repeatedly because really, I watched a *lot* of ANTM and it was a *long* time ago.

I didn't know that this was the ANTM book I've been waiting for since high school, but this is just about everything I could have hoped for in an ANTM memoir. I had to force myself not to read the entire thing in a day; instead I read the entire thing in a day and a half. Hartshorne is writing from enough distance to have eyes wide open, and better than that, she's funny (which maybe you should expect from a comedian! But again, I have followed exactly none of the contestant's careers, so what do I know).

"'What's everybody's schtick?' asked one girl.
'I was just wondering that!' I said. 'I think I'd be the ditzy one.'
'That's so silly!' said a girl with piercing blue eyes. 'I'd be the beautiful one,' she added, flipping her long blond hair over her shoulder.
Maybe, I thought, I will be the second-most ditzy one." (loc. 298*)

And later:

"After a while, one of the girls whispered, 'I think they're taking us to meet with a therapist.'
[...]
'My parents will be so mad if they find out I talked to a therapist.'
'So will my boyfriend!'
My eyes bugged out of my head. I wanted to tell them those were actually both great reasons to see a therapist." (loc. 623)

But it's also really, really thoughtful. If any of the girls mentioned above made it to the actual show—the first quote is from the open call Hartshorne went to; the second is from the pre-show chaos in Puerto Rico, when they were down to 50-odd girls but the eventual cast had yet to be finalized—we never find out, and they can't be identified from that info alone; later, although Hartshorne is *biting* about some of the people involved in the production of the show (certain personalities Do Not Come Off Well, to say the least), she says this about conversations with the other contestants: "We talked about everything: ambitions, creative desires, sex. And since I would never share any of their stories, I can only tell you my own contributions" (loc. 1745). Though the other contestants show up repeatedly, as well they should, Hartshorne writes of them with nothing but respect—if this is a tell-all, they are not the people who need to be told on.

Reality TV is manufactured reality, of course; by now most of us know this. But as the book goes on, it becomes clearer and clearer just how much the show prioritized the show (and their own paychecks—the contestants, of course, were not being paid beyond a not-guaranteed food stipend) over reality or over the contestants' well-being. I'll leave most of the stories to Hartshorne's telling (did I not tell you to skip the reviews and go read the book already?), but I do want to talk about the completely bonkers scenario of being a plus-sized model on this show.

"Of course, I was also looking at everyone's physical size and comparing it with mine. I wondered if they could all instantly tell that I was the plus-size contestant." (loc. 1215)

I'm not here to discuss Hartshorne's body or size (or the bodies or sizes of any of the other contestants), but it is *absolutely batshit* that—on ANTM, but also in the modelling industry more generally—the size window for "straight size" models is so narrow that it might not be immediately clear who is classed as "plus size". (There's also the part where pretty much everything ANTM did for the plus-sized contestants had nothing to do with industry reality? Like, cutting off all of Hartshorne's hair and thus making her unbookable at agencies that hired plus-sized models; handing out a one-size-fits-all prize contract with an agency that did not work with plus-sized models...)

But more than that, it was immediately clear to Hartshorne that the show had a specific storyline for her, and that story was Sad Fat Girl:

"And now, as I looked around at all these achingly thin girls, it was starting to hit me that every challenge, every panel, every conversation going forward, was going to be about my weight. That was going to be My Thing, no matter what else I did." (loc. 583)

"'Do you think it [a near-collision] was because you're plus-size, because you took up more of the runway?'" (loc. 1885)

"I didn't want to do a naked photo shoot. It wasn't the actual being naked I was dreading. I'd run around the house naked. I was dreading the interview that would inevitably follow." (loc. 2334)

"They kept pressuring me to say that I hated my outfit, that I hated my body, that I was uncomfortable. And I just wouldn't. [...] while I didn't like my body, I wasn't going to say it. I was holding on to my dignity by a thread, but goddamn it, I wasn't going to let go. When the episode aired, they showed me saying things they took completely out of context—"That makes me super uncomfortable" and "I don't like it"—and made it seem like I was talking about my outfit." (loc. 2998)

Hartshorne was aware enough of what the show wanted from her that she developed a strategy (an excellent strategy, I must say) of trotting out whale facts instead of sound bites, but the whole thing is just...telling. Not surprising, but telling.

I don't know whether we've seen so few ANTM memoirs because of the dire warnings the producers gave the contestants about NDAs and so on (the gist of which: we own your life story now, and we can say whatever we want but you can't say anything at all or we will bankrupt you and your children and your children's children), but I am over here praying that this releases the floodgates—and that, in the meantime, Hartshorne makes some serious bank on it. Why are you still reading this review? Go read the book instead.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

I watched all the cycles of ANTM and loved getting to know the models from the show. I was so enthralled with Sarah's story and book, right from the start! It's authentic, raw, and truthful. I'm so happy this book exists. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.