Sarah Hartshorne, Cycle 9's only plus-size contestant on America's Next Top Model, narrates her own memoir You Wanna Be on Top? in this audiobook, and the self-narration is not incidental to the experience - it is the experience. Hartshorne spent seven hours describing the show, the house, the hidden cameras, and the specific mechanics of manufactured drama to a recording microphone, and the result is one of the more candid reality television accounts available in audio. At 7 hours and 26 minutes, it covers the auditions, the infamous cruise ship the girls were not allowed to enjoy, the L.A. model house wired with cameras, and the escalating producer interview tactics that Hartshorne had to decode in real time as they happened.
Amanda Montell's blurb - juicy, nostalgic, entertaining, and disturbing - is accurate in all four registers. Hartshorne is not writing a takedown piece; she is writing a reckoning. The distinction matters. She is explicit about loving what the show produced in terms of cultural iconography and about mourning what it did to the people who participated in it. The humor is real throughout, but it sharpens into something more pointed when Hartshorne examines the specific producer techniques that turned contestants' emotional vulnerabilities into plot material. Reviewers who grew up watching the show describe the experience of listening as both nostalgic and progressively disturbing - exactly the combination Montell's blurb promises.
The Closets Were the Only Unmonitored Space
The structural question of this audiobook is how Hartshorne holds together a nostalgic entertainment memoir and a sharp critique of the industry she is describing, and she largely succeeds. The secret is specificity. She does not make broad arguments about reality television; she documents particular choices, particular conversations, particular moments where she understood something about how the show worked that she had not understood before the filming started.
Several of these revelations are genuinely surprising even for viewers who watched the show critically. Why did the house lack a microwave or dishwasher? Why did girls regularly faint during eliminations? Why were the most honest conversations always held in closets? Hartshorne answers each of these with precision rather than speculation, drawing on interviews with other contestants and production crew members as well as her own first-person account. The closet detail is particularly telling - camera crews could not fit into closets, making them the only unmonitored space in the house, which says everything about the kind of environment the producers constructed. The audiobook does not settle for anecdote; it builds toward an analysis of how the show constructed the reality it claimed to capture.
Hartshorne's Own Voice Carries the Sharpest Material
Hartshorne's voice as a narrator is the book's primary asset. She is a natural performer - her comic instincts are evident throughout, and she knows how to time a revelation for maximum impact without sacrificing honesty for effect. One reviewer who read the book described her as an amazing storyteller, and the audio version benefits enormously from having the storyteller present. She does not simply read her own prose; she inhabits it, and the difference between a performed and a narrated memoir is audible in the first few minutes.
The body image thread runs through the entire book with more complexity than the term plus-size contestant in the marketing suggests. Hartshorne was the token representative of a body type the show publicly championed while privately treating as a liability, and her account of navigating that double standard - in photo shoots, in judging feedback, in producer conversations about her weight - is the book's sharpest material. It is delivered with the kind of earned specificity that comes from having actually been in the room where those conversations happened. Hartshorne manages to be funny about this and furious about this within the same passage, and that tonal range is only possible when the narrator fully owns the material she is delivering.
Amanda Montell's Cultish Lens on the House
The book was blurbed by Amanda Montell, author of Cultish, which is relevant context: Cultish examined the language structures of manipulative group environments, and You Wanna Be on Top? operates in adjacent territory. Hartshorne describes the model house as an environment specifically constructed to produce emotional dependency and conflict, using deprivation, surveillance, and targeted questioning from producers to generate the footage the show needed. Listeners familiar with Montell's analysis will find it applied here in concrete, specific form.
The tone does not maintain a single register throughout. Some chapters are funnier than others; the material around the judging panel and Hartshorne's specific experiences with individual judges is more uncomfortable than the earlier episodes in Puerto Rico. This unevenness is not a flaw - it reflects the actual emotional texture of what is being described - but listeners expecting a consistent comedy memoir should prepare for genuine anger in the later sections. The question of which judge was the meanest off camera, which Hartshorne promises to answer, delivers on that promise without turning the book into a celebrity grievance list.
A Reckoning for Anyone Who Watched ANTM
This audiobook works for anyone who watched ANTM at any point in its run and has been processing their retrospective discomfort with what they were watching. It works equally well for listeners with no prior relationship to the show who are interested in how unscripted television is actually made. Hartshorne's analysis is accessible without assuming knowledge of the cast or episodes. The 7-hour runtime is comfortable, the narration is uniformly excellent, and the book does what good cultural criticism does - it changes the way you see something you thought you already understood.
