Yellowjackets Actress Nicole Maines Announces New Memoir: ‘What I Needed to Say’ (Exclusive)

Nicole Maines is ready to share her story in her own words.

The Yellowjackets actress, 26, announced, exclusively with PEOPLE, that she will publish a new memoir. It Gets Better...Except When It Gets Worse is slated for release this fall from The Dial Press.

It Gets Better details Maines’ journey from her perspective. The actress came out as a transgender when she was a child, a story that was told in the 2015 book, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family by Amy Ellis Nutt. Maines was also the plaintiff in the 2014 Maine Supreme Judicial Court case Doe v. Clenchy, which ruled that Maines' school district violated the state's Human Rights Act by not allowing her to use her school's student restrooms.

“For a long time, I tried and struggled to find a space to use my voice and share my thoughts,” Maines tells PEOPLE, of her new book. “I attempted to use my social media platforms for that purpose, but I found more times than not that I was running up against an immovable wall of online trolls and bigots. I needed a way to be able to say what I needed to say without inviting a pointless debate over my own humanity.”

“I was able to do that with this book,” the actress and author continues. “Over the course of writing It Gets Better, what started as a memoir became a collection of the thoughts, feelings and fears that occupy my brain while I try to keep my grip on my own sanity as the world devolves around me. It’s more fun than I make it sound.”

Maines will also write about leaving her home state for Hollywood, and landing her first major role in the CW show Supergirl, in which she became TV's first live-action transgender superhero. Since then, Maines has appeared in the Emmy-nominated seriesYellowjackets and has held roles in Freeform’s Good Trouble and CW’s The Flash. She was also nominated for a GLAAD Media Award and named as one of Variety’s 2022 “Power of Young Hollywood” honorees.

In It Gets Better, the actress will also share the lessons she’s learned throughout her life and career, and take on messaging often internalized by young girls and queer youth.

The book aims to remind readers that “sometimes, a happy ending is only the beginning of the story," per the book’s official description, and is a candid coming-of-age memoir about someone “who’s just existing.”

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It Gets Better...Except When It Gets Worse will be published on Oct. 15 and is now available for preorder, wherever books are sold.