Content
My Life as a 10-Year-Old Boy opens with a dedication to Daws Butler, a list of acknowledgements and a foreword from Cartwright's The Simpsons co-star Dan Castellaneta. The first chapter of the book details Cartwright's life and career prior to 1987. In the second chapter, Cartwright recalls the day she went to audition for a role in a series of animated shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show. The shorts were about a dysfunctional family and Cartwright intended to audition for the role of Lisa Simpson, the eldest daughter. Upon arriving at the audition, she found the role of her brother Bart to be much more interesting. Matt Groening, creator of the shorts, allowed her to audition for Bart, and gave her the job on the spot after hearing her reading. From there, the book contains her experiences as the voice of Bart. After three seasons of shorts, a half-hour spinoff called The Simpsons debuted in 1989. In the following chapters, she recalls the early days of The Simpsons, commenting on the recording process and her co-stars and revealing how she got the roles of some of the other characters she voices, including Nelson Muntz and Ralph Wiggum. In the 15th chapter, she discusses her experiences of voicing a famous character, but rarely being recognized.
Several chapters are devoted to a detailed "behind the scenes" look at how an episode of The Simpsons is made, including the writing, recording and animation. My Life as a 10-Year-Old Boy contains multiple excerpts from Cartwright's diary detailing various events, mostly encounters with The Simpsons guest stars. Guest stars she talks about include Ernest Borgnine, Danny DeVito, Kirk Douglas, Mel Gibson, Kelsey Grammer, Tom Jones, Michael Jackson, Mickey Rooney, Meryl Streep and Elizabeth Taylor. One chapter describes the day she found out that Phil Hartman, a frequent guest star on The Simpsons, was murdered. The final chapter is a retrospective in which she answers the question "what is it like to be the voice behind the star?"
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