Sorry Not Sorry

ISBN: 978-0399184987


Buy the book

Sorry Not Sorry

Dreams, Mistakes, and Growing Up


by Naya Rivera


Funny and deeply personal, Sorry Not Sorry recounts Glee star Naya Rivera’s successes and missteps, urging young women to pursue their dreams and to refuse to let past mistakes define them.

Navigating through youth and young adulthood isn’t easy, and in Sorry Not Sorry, Naya Rivera shows us that we’re not alone in the highs, lows, and in-betweens. Whether it’s with love and dating, career and ambition, friends, or gossip, Naya inspires us to follow our own destiny and step over—or plod through—all the crap along the way. After her rise and fall from childhood stardom on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Family Matters, barely eking her way through high school, a brief stint as a Hooters waitress, going through thick and thin with her mom/manager, and resurrecting her acting career as Santana Lopez on Glee, Naya emerged from these experiences with some key life lessons:

Sorry:
- All those times I scrawled “I HATE MY MOM” in my journal. Moms and teenage daughters will never get along—we just have to realize it’s nothing personal on either side.
- At-home highlights and DIY hair extensions. Some things are best left to the experts, and hair dye is one of them.
- Falling in love with the idea of a person, instead of the actual person.

Not Sorry:
- That I don’t always get along with everyone. Having people not like you is a risk you have to take to be real, and I’ll take that over being fake any day.
- Boob job. People have a lot of opinions about plastic surgery, but more than 10 years after I got my boobs, they still make me happy when I look in the mirror. It might have been the best $8K I’ve ever spent.
- Getting my financial disasters out of the way early—before I was married or had a family—so that the only credit score that I wrecked was my own.

Even with a successful career and a family that she loves more than anything else, Naya says, “There’s still a thirteen-year-old girl inside of me making detailed lists of how I can improve, who’s never sure of my own self-worth.” Sorry Not Sorry is for that thirteen-year-old in all of us.