Going Wilde: How I Became the Woman I Was Meant to Be by Creating a Woman I’m Not

Trailer park girl. Teen bride. Single mom. Instagram celebrity.

It would be easy to mistake Jessica Wilde’s life for a simple rags-to-riches story. After all, she went from a youth marred by poverty, sexual abuse, and bad decisions, to internet fame that gave her control over her own fate, and provided a lucrative living.

If happiness were only that simple.

In reality, Wilde’s personal journey of growth and triumph involved a daunting struggle to define the real woman behind her online creation. The bitter irony was that becoming a social media celebrity only made understanding and appreciating who she actually was, and forging deep and lasting relationships, exponentially harder.

This remarkably candid memoir follows Wilde’s thoughtful struggles to untangle social media’s jungle of destructive illusions and embrace her own authentic identity. It serves as a damning cautionary tale for anyone creating a digital façade on sites from Facebook, to Instagram, to LinkedIn. The ugly reality that Going Wilde reveals is that social media undermines the essential personal connections it was created to foster. But as Jessica Wilde ultimately discovered, a healthy sense of self and deep happiness could not be further from what appears above a “like” button.