Rivera spoke with People about excerpts from her book, in which she shared that she started struggling with anorexia as a teen. Interestingly, Rivera describes it as something that wasn’t exactly a struggle but a socially normalized “game.” She didn’t realize how disordered her eating was until she started writing it all down:
“By the time I was a sophomore, I started feeling that what had begun as a game had maybe gone too far. I just avoided food at all costs,” she writes in Sorry Not Sorry of coping with her parents splitting and reuniting at the same time her acting career was stalling. “If my mom had packed a lunch for me, I’d either trash it or find some excuse to give it away.”
Rivera says so many girls around her seemed to be going through the same thing that it didn’t occur to her it was bad. She says, “I had no way of knowing if I was going through it worse. I was juggling my feelings and it makes me sad that there are girls still going through that 15 years after I went through it.”
Rivera’s big reveal is that while filming Glee in 2010, she became pregnant, and terminated her pregnancy. Rivera didn’t tell her boyfriend, actor Ryan Dorsey, at the time. She went to get an abortion during her day off from filming the show. She and Dorsey married in 2014 and now have an 11-month-old child together. Of the experience, Rivera says:
“It was very scary to open up about everything… It’s not something a lot of people talk about, but I think they should. I know some people might read it and say, ‘What the Hell?’ But I hope someone out there gets something out of it.”
Rivera isn’t yet 30, so hopefully there’ll be another follow-up to this in 20 years or so. Honestly, the way this lady goes I’d read one every decade at least. As she says, “I’ve done a lot of living…I’m a 79-year-old trapped in a 29-year-old’s body.”
