Hannah Hart's 'Buffering: Unshared Tales of a Life Fully Loaded': Read an excerpt

Whether she’s in the kitchen prepping some pasta and chugging pinot for her YouTube show My Drunk Kitchen, or getting passionate with Bill Nye on While The Water Boils, charismatic and hilarious digital influencer Hannah Hart always has worthwhile tidbits of advice to share. So naturally, her memoir, Buffering: Unshared Tales of a Life Fully Loaded, is a must read.

The crazy-popular social media star spills secrets and tales from journals she’s kept over the years, touching on topics such as faith, sexuality and self-worth. Plus, her puns are guaranteed to be Hart-felt. Below, Hart details her new memoir and previews an exclusive excerpt of Buffering. But first, pour yourself a glass (or three) of wine.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Your new book, Buffering is a memoir of your life to date. I’m sure you’re very excited for everyone to read it, but are there some nerves that come with opening up and sharing so much with readers for the first time?

Hannah Hart: I am thrilled and terrified. Big time nerves. It’s really exciting because I feel a great responsibility to tell my story given the platform that I have, and to the people that are willing to read it, and the people that are even just curious to read it. But there is a really big sense of vulnerability that you feel by putting yourself out there in this way. We always have the assumption that if people don’t care it’s because they just don’t know, but then if you write your whole life story and put it out there and there’s nothing, it’s like, well, I guess they just don’t care.

You studied literature in college. Was writing always something you wanted to do? Back then, YouTube videos might not have been how you expected to gain this platform for self-expression.

One hundred percent. I’m a huge, huge fan of writing. I’m a huge fan of memoirs. I’ve gotten so much from reading other people’s stories — from those who are willing to share them. Jeanette Walls’ The Glass Castle is just phenomenal, and I always had a dream that one day I would be able to write my own, and be able to share my own story. We have this time where you leave your adolescence behind and enter adulthood, and this book reflects the process of processing that and getting into the adult that you want to be.

Was the book born out of the journals you kept when you were growing up?

Were you always such an open person?

I was open to an extent. I was open about sharing experiences, in a way similar to reporting the news, but I didn’t want to share how I was processing them. The reason the book is called Buffering is because it’s about the time that I spent with a boundary up so I could internally process the things that I have to process in my life, before sharing the journey of how.

Buffering by Hannah Hart

Excerpt Pg. 15-16

I wish I hadn’t been so hasty when I was twenty, shoving our memories into garbage bags in my mom’s house. I regret not taking something for myself—an heirloom—whereas Naomi had the maturity and the foresight to salvage the things that were precious to her. But I suppose we can’t hold on to everything. Sometimes we have to start over and make new heirlooms for our children to eventually put into their own boxes or bags as they see fit.

But from the time I was a teenager I’ve kept a journal. I began journaling because of my mother. Initially I thought I could make some sense of her logic by transcribing and translating her thoughts. I figured that if I didn’t understand what she was saying, it was simply because I wasn’t paying close enough attention. If I could crack her code and learn to speak her language, we would find a way to communicate. I spent years recording my mother’s prose, word for word, and then looking for a purpose where there was none. But then eventually I found one. Because the habit of transcribing her thoughts led me to begin recording my own.

When I set out to write this book, I realized that although I didn’t save anything from our old house, my heirlooms have always been with me, in the form of the memories recorded in my journals. So this chapter and those that follow, and the journals that inspired them, are my inheritance. And now I’d like to pass them down to you.

Watch Hart read from another chapter her book in an exclusive video for Instant below. Buffering: Unshared Tales of a Life Fully Loaded is out now.

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