“If you can affect someone when they’re young, you are in their hearts forever.”

Mara Wilson’s precocious lisp was everywhere throughout my childhood; looking back, and on imdb, she wasn’t everywhere but simply in two movies that played on a frequent loop in my house. Her breakthrough role as Robin William’s daughter in Mrs Doubtfire and the titular role in Matilda has guaranteed her spot in the pop culture annals of anyone alive in the ’90s regardless of her adult career choices.

I believe a lot of people my age (Mara Wilson is only about 6 months older than myself) saw her as a peer and developed a lot of strong memories associated with her portrayal of Matilda. Growing up in Burbank, California it was common for children to audition for commercials and small TV roles. Mara, following in her brother’s foot steps of acting as a way to start college fund, accidentally got more famous than her parent’s had expected- her mother was never a pushy “stage mom.” She is open and honest about how roles started drying up when she hit puberty but that she eventually found her place on stage and especially in writing.  Mara popped back up on my, and several other’s, radar when she wrote an article for Cracked.com a few years back.  She has slowly started to make her way in pop culture as an adult but with her eyes a bit more open this go around.

If you’re looking for Where Am I Now to give you pages and pages of Robin William’s nostalgia you’ll be disappointed. She shares a few stories from on set but she admits that she lost track of him years before his suicide. She has a few wonderful stories about Danny DeVito (director and co-star in Matilda) including a wonderful act of kindness during her mother’s battle with cancer.

“But there is a place where people like me live and love while fretting constantly about their own mortality and the fate of the universe. I know who I am now: I am a New Yorker.”

Aside from her Hollywood years she is also very candid about her struggles with OCD and anxiety. She self-diagnosed herself after reading a book with an OCD character that mirrored her own struggles. Her fascination with death did not make her a lot of friends growing up…

My biggest complaint is the arrangement of her stories don’t follow an easy timeline; she bounces around in ages and various stages in her career and education. I wished she’d taken a more linear approach to her layout.