Anne Hathaway on Why She Quit Drinking and Chose to Discuss Her Past Miscarriage Openly

Culture

Anne Hathaway gave Vanity Fair a very honest interview where she discussed two major moments from her personal life that she chose to share with the world: her past miscarriage and fertility journey, along with her decision to stop drinking.

The actress shared on Instagram in 2019 that she was pregnant with her second child. She added, “⁣for everyone going through infertility and conception hell, please know it was not a straight line to either of my pregnancies. Sending you extra love 💕”

Hathaway told the outlet that she had a miscarriage in 2015 before she later welcomed her first child with husband Adam Shulman in March 2016. The couple has two sons now.

She was working at the time of the miscarriage, performing in a six-week, one-woman off-Broadway show called Grounded. “The first time it didn’t work out for me. I was doing a play and I had to give birth onstage every night,” Hathaway shared.

She told her friends visiting her backstage after performances what was happening to her. “It was too much to keep it in when I was onstage pretending everything was fine,” she said. “I had to keep it real otherwise….So when it did go well for me, having been on the other side of it—where you have to have the grace to be happy for someone—I wanted to let my sisters know, ‘You don’t have to always be graceful. I see you and I’ve been you.’ It’s really hard to want something so much and to wonder if you’re doing something wrong.”

She later learned that many of her friends had gone through similar experiences and saw a study reporting that as many as 50 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage.

“I thought, Where is this information? Why are we feeling so unnecessarily isolated? That’s where we take on damage,” Hathaway said. “So I decided that I was going to talk about it. The thing that broke my heart, blew my mind, and gave me hope was that for three years after, almost daily, a woman came up to me in tears and I would just hold her, because she was carrying this [pain] around and suddenly it wasn’t all hers anymore.” The 2019 Instagram, “it was more about what I wasn’t going to do. I wasn’t going to feel ashamed of something that seemed to me statistically to actually be quite normal.”

Hathaway was similarly open about why she stopped drinking—and how that choice changed her life for the better. She first spoke about that decision in January 2019, revealing then that she stopped to be more present for her 3-year-old son.

The decision goes way deeper than that though, she shared. “I knew deep down it wasn’t for me,” she said of alcohol. “And it just felt so extreme to have to say, ‘But none?’ But none. If you’re allergic to something or have an anaphylactic reaction to something, you don’t argue with it. So I stopped arguing with it.”

She stressed that she wasn’t saying that from a place of judgement for anyone else: “It’s a path everybody has to walk for themselves,” she said. “My personal experience with it is that everything is better. For me, it was wallowing fuel. And I don’t like to wallow. The thing that I have faith in is that everybody else is going to have one or two drinks, and by the time everybody gets to two drinks, you’ll feel like you’ve had two drinks—but without the hangover.”

At age 41, Hathaway said that she is caring for herself better than she was in her 20s: “I make a lot of my lifestyle choices in service of supporting mental health,” she said. “I stopped participating in things that I know to be draining or can cause spirals. I actually don’t have a relationship with myself online.”

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