Here’s Everything We Learnt From Bachelorette Angie Kent’s New Memoir
We’re just about to watch Angie Kent choose between handsome, boring Carlin and Timm’s chaotic but adorable pest energy on The Bachelorette season finale.
This week, she also dropped a memoir/self-help book, If You Don’t Laugh You’ll Cry, which is chockers full of all the wisdom she’s gleaned in 29 years as a daughter, sister, social worker, traveller and beloved TV personality. It’s a cruisey read (BIG FONT) and is thick with her positive can-do attitude and trademark honesty.
If you want someone to gently encourage you to love yourself and eat more greens, this is the beach read for you. But, if you don’t have time for 200+ pages, we’ve pulled out a couple saucy tidbits.
Here’s what we learned about Angie Kent from If You Don’t Laugh You’ll Cry:
Angie’s former unhealthy habits are… too familiar.
“When I was younger I thought I could numb my problems with a big ol’ Maccas cheeseburger, drinking all night and sleeping all day.”
Sounds like my ideal night tbh. Angie’s now taking being a coeliac more seriously, and healthy eating and exercise is just part of her plan to manage her endometriosis diagnosis.
Angie’s definitely had a love life – even if she hasn’t be in love.
She’s delightfully upfront about dating around in her mid-20s, and it’s just like us. “I was seeing a few different guys, mainly just to have that attention from the opposite sex,” she writes.
“I was always keeping these gents at a healthy distance so neither of us could get close enough to catch the feels – because, my god, catching feels was so out of my emotional capability at that point. I was scared shitless of someone really getting to know me and seeing the right mess that I thought I was.”
Later in the book, she describes a bunch of her relationships in short. She lost her virginity in Thailand after making her older boyfriend wait two years. A “passionate Greek man” who she stayed up all night pashing on holiday, offered to “start selling drugs in Mykonos to pay for my flight from London to Greece”.
Wild.
But the real highlight from that section is this line: “I’m a sucker for that Lana Del Rey-themed romance. I used to make one guy act out her film clips with me.” I would pay money to see a video of that.
Angie struggles with her mental health.
Angie is very frank about suffering from anxiety, and how she struggled with bulimia in her teens and early 20s.
She talks about her anxiety as something she has managed as part of her life, first with medication and then by focusing on good health. “Even though I have crazy anxiety, I get off on pushing myself to the limit – which isn’t the greatest habit, I know, but I do expect so much from myself,” she writes.
“I would never let my anxiety stop me from doing things. I have never stayed in a comfort zone just because my anxiety might be on fire and it would be better if I stayed home and did what my anxiety wants me to do. I can’t let it win.”
She candidly describes how her bulimia formed as a way to manage her unhealthy eating habits. “I went from throwing up junk food to then throwing up sandwiches and then eventually I was throwing up my dinner every night.”
Her first relationship – with an older bloke when she was still at school – for a time curbed the eating disorder. “He didn’t drink, he didn’t party, he was super chilled and smart and funny. We would go out and eat healthier foods, always be at the beach, and just go and do more active stuff. And I got to escape high school. I got to feel that love and I didn’t feel the need to treat myself badly anymore.”
But when they broke up after she left school, she fell into old habits. “I got better as I got older when I started to understand my body and my mental health more.”
Speaking of booze: Angie gave up white wine for a good reason.
She refers to white wine as “lady petrol” and “Argie juice”. The latter comes from the name Yvie gave her drunken alter-ego: Argie Bargie, “a real mole”. “She can stay in the past with the lady petrol and gluten where they all belong,” Angie wrote.
Gogglebox gave Angie shingles.
She was living between houses in Sydney and London, house and dog-sitting, and working as a nanny. “It got to the point that I was so incredibly run-down that I managed to get shingles while I was working full time as a nanny, filming for Gogglebox, moving every few days trying to save all the money I could to get myself back to the UK where I still bloody lived on struggle street most of the time.”
Angie and Yvie decided to ditch Gogglebox because they’d lost their spark.
“By the end I think we might have acted a little bit, but it was still us. We were forcing ourselves to be the same people over the last four years but really we had loved, lost, grown and felt we needed a change,” she writes. “It could feel invasive, too, because the cameras and the audience were in our house.
“I think we lost our spark a little bit. We became a little too comfortable.”
Finally, wearing heels on The Bachelorette would’ve been brutal for her.
At 16, a virus attacked her knee and it swelled up, and never seemed to go back to normal. “I have suffered terribly from pain with the left knee that swells up every time I stand on it for too long or even try to be a lady and wear high-heeled shoes.”
How did she cope with all those cocktail parties???
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If You Don’t Laugh You’ll Cry is out now through Hachette. The Bachelorette finale is on at 7:30pm tonight on Channel 10.