If you, like me, have never watched Toddlers & Tiaras, let me give you a quick primer on who Eden Wood is: she's a cute little girl who retired from beauty pageants at age 6 to become more involved in her acting and modeling career. (I swear I did not make up that sentence.) Eden's mother Mickie Wood has faced plenty of criticism for supposedly sexualizing her child and treating her like a pint-sized cash cow, but in a scathing tell-all book, the toddler’s former manager Heather Ryan implies that Mickie has no trouble throwing her fellow pageant moms under a bus. Particularly if they're more famous than she is ... like a certain Honey Boo Boo clan.
Ryan claims that Eden's mom was not only incredibly jealous of Honey Boo Boo's success on TLC, Mickie called the entire family "vomit inducing" for their "ugly, overweight hillbilly" appearance.
Damn! It must be true what they say: hell hath no fury like a stage mom scorned.
In a chapter of Ryan's book called "The Honey Boo Boo Boom," Eden's former manager wrote that Mickie had little love for Alana Thompson or her mom June Shannon:
The red neck pageant kid from Georgia and her overweight family are everything that Mickie hated — hated about herself, hated about the persona of pageant moms and hated about ugly, overweight hillbillies. Mickie was disgusted by the woman and her family’s less than stellar appearance. I mean disgusted — to the point where she would lament for hours about how vomit inducing the Shannon family was.
She went on to say that Mickie was furious about the Here Comes Honey Boo Boo show that made the family a household name:
I’m pretty sure I heard a loud, distinctive BOOM from Taylor, Arkansas as Mickie Wood’s head exploded. The TLC spin off became an enormous success and suddenly the chubby little pageant girl, who had never won so much as a ‘Queen’ title, kicked our ass in the ratings and popularity with her own train wreck television show.
Now, it seems to me that you have to take most "tell-all" books with a massive grain of salt, because the author usually is on less-than-stellar terms with the subject. Heather Ryan knows that the juicier her stories are, the better her book sales will be, so she's not exactly motivated to downplay any existing drama.
Still, it doesn't seem all that farfetched that Eden's mother would have been upset by the fact that despite all her schemings, Honey Boo Boo is far more famous than her own little girl. Mickie made her intentions for Eden pretty clear in this 2011 interview:
I don’t think we were trying to make (fame) happen. But when it did, we rolled with it. Why not? It’s the American way. If you know that somebody loves Eden, why not write a book? Why not make a doll? Why not record a song?
Right? Heck, why not film a reality show episode where your child shaves her half-naked "adopted grandfather"? That certainly wouldn't create a negative persona about pageant moms or hillbillies. *cough*
Source
I think everyone already knew this, but yeah. They wish they were as beautimous as us.