Autopsy of an Ex-Teen Heartthrob

by Avan Jogia

Writer, director, and actor Avan Jogia delivers a bright and acidic poetry collection on fame, rage, love, and sadness. A biting postmortem of the modern age, for fans of Lana Del Rey and Atticus.

Avan Jogia grew up as a teen idol. He stumbled into the spotlight during the birth of the internet, the early days of Instagram and Twitter, before everyone online was a star. He spent his time in that spotlight writing, observing the cult of celebrity, the hilarity, the absurdity, and sometimes sinister side of being idolized before you’ve even had the chance to decide for yourself who you are.

Now, in his most revealing and honest work to date, he has assembled a book of poems as an act of self-dissection. Part boozy lovesick rage and part personal reflection on the nature of fame, Autopsy (of an Ex-Teen Heartthrob) is a sharp, tantalizing collection of poems examining Avan’s relationship with ego, idolatry, love as an act of worship, rage as an act of prayer, and sadness as confession.

Through vivid imagery (and sometimes startling honesty) Avan cuts himself open and observes the false gods he has worshipped, the ways he has sinned, and exhumes a version of himself that looks like someone we all know: a person searching for the means to cure pain, mend the wounds of insecurity, and satiate cravings for love.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Memoir, Audiobook, Adult, Autobiography, Biography

240 pages, Hardcover

First published March 11, 2025

Reviews

[Ayman · Rating 5 out of 5]

this collection of poems explores the themes of love, fame, and the complexities of human emotions. avan jogia’s ability to capture fleeting moments of emotion in such a powerful way is truly remarkable. the poems in the beginning of the book were my personal favorite, especially ‘orange carpet.’

avan jogia’s voice in poetry is fresh and unique. each poem felt like a small revelation, leaving readers with a sense of both awe and longing. avan’s personal journey is woven through every page, offering an open window into his world that feels deeply authentic and incredibly moving

[jess · Rating 3 out of 5]

Actual rating: 2.5⭐️
Aggressively mid. Confused because of the reviewers who mention how watching him in Victorious as a child made them read (and love) this, which he complains about in his poems, time and time again. While I picked this up partially because of that, and because of Halsey (lol; I really enjoy them together), I only really liked like a few of this collection's poems. The one about moving past childhood nostalgia and making new memories was a treat! Also the one about the nice fan he met on the subway. The rest were mostly Jogia complaining about being a celebrity, and while he acknowledges that he's not nearly as famous as his peers, his work is a bit corny. I try to avoid calling something cringe (to be cringe is to be free), but...hm. Don't get me wrong, Hollywood is so ridiculously fucked up...but his writing...it's hard to empathize with Jogia when he's all, "Sex is Ego. Sex is God. Sex is Life. Sex is feeling. Sex is" blah, blah, blah. Also, I assumed he was in a bajillion or so films/shows with how he describes his grind, but he really only talked about Victorious which makes sense because...Beck...heartthrob...with I would've blissfully ignored if he was a more prolific writer. I listened to this while watching the river. I wouldn't suggest sitting down and reading this.

[Jan Agaton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved victorious so of course I had to listen to this

[Mica · Rating 1 out of 5]

not every celebrity needs to lift a pen omg he’s very not self aware 😭

[oceania · Rating 2 out of 5]

listened as an audiobook while high off the eddy, good choice because the best part of this by far was listening to avan jogia’s narration. his performance is very compelling, but then again, he is an Actor, which he will not let you forget that in this autobiographical collection of poetry.

things i liked: i love hearing poems with rhyme schemes, even if half-hearted. genuinely interesting getting an insight into his move to LA to start his career as a teen actor. this collection frequently threatens to have complex and nuanced thoughts about hollywood and being a young actor in an exploitative industry.

anyway, my main takeaway from listening to this is that if halsey breaks up with this guy, not only will he have lost the only thing that makes him actually relevant today, he is also in real danger of going down an anti-woke right wing men’s rights rabbit hole. i can’t prove this, obviously, but the signs are there. as evidence i point to: his referring to teenage fans as “nymphets” with “nubile throats”, “the exhausting unending drone from the mouth of the leftist” wow so insightful, the entire poem “a group for every outsider” which seems to be a weak attempt at critiquing identity politics, invoking holocaust resistance fighter SOPHIE SCHOLL in a poem about doom scrolling?????, wanting to (only semi-ironically) fuck sylvia plath, and a generally careless over-use of the words “whore” and “prostitute” to refer to women. not even sex workers or anything (sex workers are reduced only to metaphors, of course), just like, an actress or a starlet or something.

also, nobody needs to hear about a hot celebrity’s thoughts about how sex with other hot celebrities (or even worse, with your own fans which is…well i don’t know it’s his life, so….) is soooooo profound. these poems read like the internal thoughts of a hot person who’s never encountered any resistance to their ideas in their life, which i fear might just describe avan jogia perfectly. i’m not ashamed to admit that it was some vague residual preteen horniness for him that prompted me to pick up this book, but rest assured the picture that he’s painted of himself in this is so trite, boring, fake-deep, and superficial (hipstery gestures at self-awareness included of course) that any attraction i may have fleetingly had at age 12 is now gone.

[Darian · Rating 2 out of 5]

This felt like the self indulgent tweets or IG posts of one the most annoying indie guys you know irl. I’ve definitely read worse, but this just was not for me.

[kimi · Rating 2 out of 5]

ohhhhhhhhhhhh it’s not good :( or im just bad at poetry :( either way :(

[viola ✨ · Rating 1 out of 5]

[11 jan 2025]
this was... so lame. simple observations are being treated like revelations, and those couple of lines about current global issues that could very well be tweets. it has no substance. i have few that i liked, few i read looking at them like "??" and the rest is just there. memoir parts are stronger.

"I became afraid. I awoke into consciousness midway through my life."
I have never stopped being scared, I don’t think. That is my great takeaway. I’m always scared. I have just learned to run right at it.

room service: "I’ve barricaded myself in my room and unplugged the phone. It’s a hostage situation with myself as both captor and captive. I can’t commit to a role."
in the morning.: "Every morning I am born into a new day like a newborn baby, helpless, lonely, and afraid."
the fascist dictator: "Because with you he has won a most valuable prize. The trust of a woman."

- his remarks about women weirds you out. - there's not a single Idea here that a 13 year old girl doesn't have

[angela · Rating 2 out of 5]

unfortunately these poems made avan jogia less hot and mysterious

[Parisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

oh no i fear i can not bear this genre of painfully earnest neo-poetry

[Shanice · Rating 2 out of 5]

Waste of a good title. This is a nightmare male, sooo insufferable. Ew

[Nour (FREE PALESTINE) Books]

he was def an ex-teen heartthrob ✋😔

[Sarah’s Shelves · Rating 2 out of 5]

stroking his ego and his dick at the same time

[Colby · Rating 5 out of 5]

avan jogia's AUTOPSY (OF AN EX-TEEN HEARTTHROB) is precisely what it says it is: an honest and visceral collection of observations, reflections, meditations, and feelings about fame, identity, celebrity, and what it's meant for jogia to be a public figure in a time where parasocial relationships, corporate greed, and societal expectations are at all an all-time high. what does it mean to be yourself when everyone in the world has a version of you in their head that you're constantly at war with?

jogia's first book, MIXED FEELINGS, is a gorgeous and expressive collection on racial identity and expectations, and AUTOPSY (OF AN EX-TEEN HEARTTHROB) turns up the volume and shatters the windows. at once a brutal study in self-reflection, a scathing critique of hollywood and celebrity worship, a curious exploration of a cruel world, and a love letter to those who have stayed and listened to him throughout it all, AUTOPSY (OF AN EX-TEEN HEARTTHROB) is avan jogia at his most vulnerable, and i am beyond grateful to be here to witness his work.

i've narrowed down my top ten to "marathon runner", "the losers prayer", "fame as", "smile, strange and strained", "healers, witches, wild-eyed sprites, and fay", "i am reminded of the painting of the creation of adam", "raw data", "scroll", "the responsibility of consciousness", and "the billionaires are going to burn the celebrities", but just read the whole thing as intended and let it burn on the way down—it's worth it all.

AUTOPSY (OF AN EX-TEEN HEARTTHROB) is out on february 11, 2025, and preorders are live. 🔪

[Kerishini · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF. I expected something that gave Jeanette McCurdy vibes but this was so cringe.

[nofy¹³ · Rating 2 out of 5]

painfully mid, mildly annoying

[les :p · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF at 150 or so pages. honestly i just got bored. the best parts of the book are honestly the parts that read like memoirs or short stories, the ‘poems’ sound like something straight out of the curriculum of the rupi kaur school of cornballs.

avan jogia i think you have the potential to come across as transgressive and impactful in your prose if you actually workshop it instead of using cuss words and pseudo-intellectual imagery like “god is the bristles of your hairbrush and the sex between our eyebrows” that dont actually express any ideas and just regurgitate 2014 tumblr reblog captions.

also your critiques on neo-feminism and the commodification of women just sound like excerpts of an incel manifesto. you’re weird for that.

overall, i just feel like i read diary of an oxygen thief for the first time. not sure what that means. maybe i’ll finish this if i ever feel like looking for an edgy instagram caption.
2/5 because of the memoir excerpts and the occasional bar

[Alia Gonzalez · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Stars. I want to be a poetry fan, but I just don’t think I am. And that’s okay.

The poems that hit really hit. The poems that don’t hit really don’t hit. And there’s no in between. They’re either phenomenal or reminiscent of the infamous brownie poem I wrote when I was 17.

Here’s the never-before-published brownie poem for good measure:

I couldn’t eat my brownie today.
I looked at it, but all I could see
Was your chocolate brown eyes
Staring back at me.
I wish I could go back
And hurt that brownie
The way you hurt me.
Smash it up
Like you smashed my heart in two,
Then throw it away
Like I wish I could do with my thoughts
Of you.

End review.

[maryam · Rating 1 out of 5]

don’t let male celebrities write poetry

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

This would have hit so hard for me if it was released when I was a teenager on tumblr 10 years ago.

[tay · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOOWIEE

[Sam Hughes · Rating 4 out of 5]

I grew up watching Avan Jogia in Nickelodeon shows, and personally after all the horrors of the network have come out against producers, I have so much pity for those kids, now adults.

Avan Jogia talks of his struggles to just be as he was sexualized as the “bad boy” and placed in a box. We hear of his vices and obstacles overcome and his linguistic flow was so witty and smart, at times i was seriously taken aback.

I am so thankful to Gallery Books, Simon Audio, Avan Jogia, and Libra.fm for the advanced access to this audiobook before February 11, 2025.

[jay k. ❤︎ · Rating 2 out of 5]

in one of the chapters, jogia writes “this is more of an observation than a poem” which i think perfectly sums up the majority of poems in this book. they weren’t poems so much as observations, which made this book feel like a collection of highlighted quotations from a memoir. other poems felt closer to short stories, and then there were the rhyming poems that had a formulaic circular repetition at the beginning and end, which read more like drafted song lyrics.

he name-drops and praises hunter s thompson more than once, and having read thompson’s work just earlier this year, i can definitely see the resemblance both in artistic voice and themes. unfortunately, i can’t say i’m a fan. in a way, jogia’s poetry reads like a less offensive version of bukowski’s (though there were a couple lines that made me grimace and think “i don’t know about that one chief.”)

there were some profound poems every here and there, and the rhyming ones have great song potential because his word choice is mostly strong and doesn’t verge on the trite. jogia is also very good at conveying tone and intimately bridging the writer-reader barrier in a way that places you in the moment where the narrative of the poems take place.

the collection as a whole, though, lacked cohesion and often read like an edgy teenager’s tumblr blog. i feel like if you put out a poetry book as a grown adult that has me imagining holden caulfield as the one writing, you need to go back to the drawing board and learn more about the craft before pursuing publication.

given that this collection had the bones of a good autobiography, i’m not sure why he didn’t write an essay collection or even a traditional memoir instead. whoever is telling these celebrities to turn to poetry when they lack a basic understanding of the art form and only seem to read sylvia plath, patti smith and charles bukowski…. please close this hellhole portal you’ve opened. we’ve had enough.

[Jamie · Rating 1 out of 5]

i like it when men shut up

[melodie | readingwithmelodie · Rating 3 out of 5]

a locked page in my notes app be like:

[Erika, I Guess⁷]

Idk how to rate this fam

[❊ maddie kay ❊ · Rating 1 out of 5]

this is absolutely something Beck would write and it’s just as bad as you think it is

[ET | murderouslittlewitchling]

ok look. i can't rate this because it feels too much like rating a memoir, even tho this is technically a collection of poems, but that is not going to stop me from complaining about it.

objectively: this was not good. the memoir ish parts were the strongest part, and the second to last poem was about dan schneider so that had me perking my ears up. there were even a small handful of the poems that i actually liked, in a "this would go so hard on tumblr in 2013" kind of way, but for the most part this was pretentious, creepy, borderline incel, shallow in a way that's trying to convince you it's deep, and just poorly written. i'm not even sure what i'm most horrified by: the fact that this guy talks about his fans as if they're a plague to society when they were literally just kids, the way that he acts like he's God's Gift to Hollywood when he was just in one mildly successful nickelodeon show a million years ago, the fact that his "poems" were more like basic observations about life that every 12 year old girl has already discovered, or the more specific things like when he said "i'm full of fucking" 10000x in one poem (what does that even mean?????) or the entire poem that was LITERALLY about how it was uncool to die from cancer if you're a celebrity (when his more-famous-than-him fiance literally almost died from cancer like.... barely a year ago. has halsey read this??????) and mind you... i'm using the word "poem" generously, because personally i think if you don't know what meter is and you've never learned anything more than a basic seuss-like rhyme pattern (which again... me being generous) you don't get to compare yourself to sylvia fucking plath or patti smith or any of the other actual poets that he puts himself in the same tier as. my guy, tay said it best: you're a modern idiot.

i picked this up because of halsey and a love for poetry, so let's just get that straight rq. i personally enjoyed victorious when it was on but it wasn't something i actively sought out. it was more my sister's thing which, as the eldest daughter, meant that i had to pretend i was too cool for it even when i secretly enjoyed it. the truth is aside from the handful of poetry lovers and halsey fans like me, the only people reading this book are here because of whatever scrap of fame victorious brought him. i think that's skewing the reviews, but i honestly don't know why because this guy has so much disdain for the kids who grew up on victorious. he mentions them in more than half of the poems and it's always derogatory. not one fucking nice word to be found about ANYONEEEEE in this book, but especially not the people who funded his entire existence.

and listen... i KNOW most of this was likely meant to be satire which if you know me, you know i love, but this was not well done so it just came off as fucking GROSS

ok i have to stop or i'll keep going all night but basically, do not recommend and fuck this guy. what a letdown. i hope he treats halsey better than he speaks about her in his book.

[Emilee McCubbins · Rating 1 out of 5]

this book was so poorly constructed that i had to phone a friend by page 3. begging PR agents to start saying no to their clients.

[Dania · Rating 1 out of 5]

yikes

he has the spirit of a writer but little of the skill. felt like someone who has never had their work critiqued. take a course and try again.