ExclusiveSelling Sunset’s Mary Bonnet Wrote Memoir to Avoid ‘Sensitive’ Experiences Being ‘Edited’ on Show

Selling Sunset star Mary Bonnet didn’t hold back in her new memoir, Selling Sunshine: Surviving Teenage Motherhood, Thriving in Luxury Real Estate, and Finally Finding My Voice, and she exclusively told Life & Style why she chose to share her past “sensitive” stories in the book.

“Almost none of what’s in the book is on this show. I wanted to be able to tell my stories my way because a lot of them are very sensitive subjects and I didn’t want them just edited and cut and kind of twisted or anything like that,” Mary, 44, tells Life & Style during a video interview. “And so most of what’s in the book, no one knows anything about. It’s pre-Selling Sunset.”

Mary opened up about many personal experiences in the book, including her toxic second marriage and her experience as a teen mom.

“I wanted to try to use my bad experiences and, actually I’ve got good and bad, but just try to motivate people when they’re in places in their lives that’s either something bad has happened or life is just not going the way they want,” the TV personality said about her motivation to write the book. “And to kind of encourage them that you can get wherever you want.”

She continued, ”I didn’t think that I was gonna be where I am today either when I was a 15-year-old. Getting pregnant in Indiana. No money, no resources. And so, there’s ways to get through it.”

In the book, which was released on Tuesday, September 24, Mary explained how she managed to get through her struggles and “how to look back on all the negative situations that can happen in your life and … how to get through those and how to use those to propel you forward.”

One of the more difficult topics covered in the book is Mary’s second marriage to a man she refers to as Drew. While their relationship initially seemed solid, she explained that their dynamic eventually became “toxic.”

“Although Drew did admit, albeit rarely, that how he treated me wasn’t right, I don’t believe that he ever completely grasped why what he did was wrong,” she wrote in the book. “He always came up with some justification for his actions, whether it was that he’d had too much to drink or he was stressed-out.”

The pair made a major change when they moved to London together, though Drew cheated on her and applied for “multiple credit cards” in her name. “He’d amassed a whopping debt, running up the bills like we had cash to burn,” she claimed, sharing that she had filed for bankruptcy and ultimately left him for good.

Another topic discussed is Mary’s pregnancy with her son, Austin Babbitt, whom she welcomed in 1997 with her ex-boyfriend when she was a junior in high school. She explained that she and her ex tried to make their relationship work for a while, though he “stopped showing up altogether.”

Mary completed high school by being “homeschooled for the last three months of my junior year and for my entire senior year,” and she only went into school to take tests.